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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 




VICTOR KUTCHIN 



WHAT BIRDS HAVE DONE 
WITH ME 



BY 

VICTOR KUTCHIN, M.D. 

A BIRD-LOVER 




ARTlerV6RlTATl 



BOSTON 
RICHARD G. BADGER 

THE GORHAM PRESS 



Copyright, 1922, by Richard G. Badger 
All Rights Reserved 






MAR -9 1922 



Made in the United States of America 
The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A. 



©CU659072 



TO 
GENE STRATTON-PORTER 

A true Nature-lover, whose interest in birds is not 

in anatomical specimens, but in creatures very 

much alive, wonderful for beauty, song 

and wings, that have spiritual uplift in 

them for human beings ; this little 

volume about live birds is 

gratefully dedicated. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER FAGE 

I Virgin Soil 9 

II Mr. Turveydrop and His Foreign 

Cousins 21 

III Motherless Babies 31 

IV The Keeper of the Spring-House . 42 
V Wings, Wings, Wings 52 

VI Pirates 63 

VII An Old Log That Was Bewitched . 72 

VIII Nothing So Silly as a Goose ... 83 

IX A Dish of Robins 94 

X Mr. Chickadee 105 

XI The Song and the Singer . . . . 119 
XII The Love Element in Bird Protec- 
tion 132 

XIII Mr. Esau 150 

XIV Stupidity Street 160 

XV Jays and Crows 175 

XVI Birds' Courtship and Marriage . . 193 

XVII Last Year's Bird's Nest .... 207 

XVIII A Saint Bartholomew of Birds . . 221 

XIX Some Invisible Defenders . . . . 237 

XX Getting Acquainted 246 

XXI The Unknown Pathway .... 261 



WHAT BIRDS HAVE DONE 
WITH ME 



What Birds Have Done 
With Me 



CHAPTER I 

VIRGIN SOIL 

Alice Gary, in her order for a picture, started 
out by asking a painter, "Has your hand the cun- 
ning to draw shapes of things that you never 
saw?" On the face of it, that request is scarcely 
less appalling than the demand in olden times for 
the interpretation of a forgotten dream. Later 
on, we find that she hoped to make the artist see 
the desired picture with her eyes, not his own. 
Using words for pigments, she is very successful 
in reproducing her memory picture, but what the 
painter saw was unfortunately never put upon 
canvas to constitute an object lesson of what a 
blur and daub a picture must be where the artist 
is attempting to paint something that he never 
actually saw himself. 

The libraries and art galleries of the world are 
9 



io What Birds Have Done With Me 

lumbered up with spoiled reams of paper and 
ruined squares of canvas upon which blind men 
have attempted to make those who have eyes see 
what they never saw themselves. Shakespeare, 
strangely enough, in his closing of "The Tem- 
pest," assured the audience that the actors are 
spirits, the play, a baseless fabric, the whole set- 
ting of the stage, an unsubstantial pageant that 
would leave not a rack behind. 

The old preface was a kind of declaration of 
superior wisdom on the part of the author who 
found it expedient to call his audience to look 
over his shoulder while he explained the profun- 
dities of his creation. Nevertheless, explana- 
tions often require further explanations, and so 
on, like a nest of Chinese boxes that turn out, 
finally, to have nothing in the last box. On the 
other hand, real things may be safely trusted in 
the hands of real people, and the rest do not 
count. 

To one who sees everything as in a picture, 
whose mind is actually photographic, memory cor- 
responds to a film that may be developed into per- 
manent pictures, or rejected and thrown away like 
seed that will not grow. With films developed 
into permanent pictures, I shall utterly fail unless 
I have the cunning to put them together and make 
them something like moving pictures; make you, 
in fact, see a real forest with trees that sway in 



Virgin Soil n 

the wind, whose boles are being attacked by ac- 
tual wood-choppers, who make the chips fly and 
the giants tremble convulsively and go crashing to 
earth with the boom of cannons. This, after in- 
numerable repetitions, is followed by the smoking 
hell of flames that out-rivals the light of the sun, 
and literally burns a great hole in the night. This 
precedes the coming of the mighty breaking plow 
to turn up the virgin soil. It is drawn by four 
yoke of oxen, following after each other — a great 
centipede walking with many legs. Alas, like the 
virgin soil turned up by the first furrow, the mind 
also must be virgin soil in order to have such a 
picture stamped indelibly upon it. Only the mind 
of a boy, waxed to receive and steeled to retain, 
would be likely to catch out-line and minutiae, 
light and shadow, central figures and back-ground, 
newness and age, and, robing all in the royal 
purple of a first experience, hang it in a temple 
not made with hands; a memory picture of such 
immortal youth that, in comparison, the baby 
faces of the Sistine fresco would seem dim and 
old. 

"Here they come, Here they come!" shouts 
the small boy, "Better get out of the way if you 
don't want to get run over;" That is not a pistol, 
that's the cracking of a whip! "Get up, Buck, 
Get up, Brin; Get up, Mose; Get up, Pete; Get 
up, Tom; Get up, Jerry; Get up, Bob; Get up, 



12 What Birds Have Done With Me 

Harry;" almost sings the driver. Then the plow 
man shouts to him, "Why the devil don't you keep 
those leaders in line ? Do you think I'm marking 
out a circus ring?" Straight to the flag; "There, 
that's better!" and away they go. The small 
boy is in pursuit and will never forget that first 
furrow. The soft, cool earth at its bottom seemed 
to have a kiss and caress for his bare feet at every 
step. Round and round they go, the share of the 
great plow, sharp as a knife, cutting off roots 
bigger than his leg, just like they were cheese. 
But sometimes they are too big, and the driver 
goes frantic, and running along the line of strain- 
ing oxen, whipping, shouting, and swearing, he 
finds it no use, they have to leave that particular 
root. Sometimes the chain will get caught on a 
stump and the big plow will fairly jump out of 
the ground, the plowman dropping the handles 
and dodging just like he was afraid of it. 

The small boy whoops and shouts himself 
hoarse, feeling that he is taking part in the grand- 
est game ever played on earth. They plowed 
six furrows around the great field by noon, and 
then turned the cattle out to graze with the yokes 
on, so they would not stray too far. Then they 
take off the share of the plow that they call the 
lay, and proceed to sharpen it by putting it in a 
furious fire until it is red hot; then, holding it 
with pinchers on a big piece of iron, called an anvil, 



Virgin Soil 13 

they pound it, and hammer it till it makes your 
ears ring. From where they stand, the small boy 
can see all over the field, and for the first time he 
notices that the furrows look like the paper bor- 
der on his own room at home. The yellow border 
around the green field looks quite pretty, and he 
wonders if the birds would enjoy it if they never 
did any more plowing, but just left it as it was. 
He does not believe the black-birds that swarmed 
around him as they followed the plow, gobbling 
up every living thing would, because they were too 
greedy to notice anything but something to eat. 
He had been too busy before to give more than a 
passing thought to the countless forms of life 
brought to light by the plow. He had not sup- 
posed that so many things lived under ground. 
Why did they do it? He would ask his father 
about it, and he must not forget to ask him why 
each new furrow lapped over on the edge of the 
last one as if it had to be held down. 

After dinner, he propounded these questions 
and was told that the earth was the real home 
of every thing; that all that lived had come forth 
from it and would ultimately return and slumber 
in its bosom. That with regard to the furrows, 
they would doubtless remain where they were if 
not held down, because so far they had not run 
away, and they probably had been turned over 
again and again; perhaps by a plow ten times as 



14 What Birds Have Done With Me 

big as old man Hill's, drawn by elephants, or 
a little plow made out of a single piece of wood 
drawn by a buffalo or a donkey, and driven by a 
man practically naked. The small boy looked a 
bit puzzled, but said, "Yes, thank you, sir," and 
started to run to catch up with old man Hill, the 
plow man, and Pete, the oxen driver. The lat- 
ter now had a new cracker on his whip. As a 
matter of fact, the urchin had not understood a 
word that his father had said to him, but he was 
conscious of a vague, troubled feeling, and when 
the plow started again, he began to scrutinize the 
living things turned up, to see if among them all, 
there were any who would make good play-fel- 
lows if he had to come and live in the ground with 
them. 

If there is such a thing as the fascination of re- 
pulsion, it would go far to explain the small boy's 
increasing interest in the creatures from the under- 
world, sent scurrying for safety in all directions, 
or left helpless in the bottom of the furrow by 
what may have seemed to them something a bit 
like what an earthquake is to us. Ralph Waldo 
Emerson emphasizes the fact, that "we see what 
we look for," and each thing that he had noticed 
in the fore-noon was multiplied by ten in the 
afternoon. Ants, worms, grubs, beetles, swarmed 
— and one had a thousand legs, as sure as you are 
alive. He found only two things that under any 



Virgin Soil 15 

possible circumstances could have been nice neigh- 
bors, — a big white thing that dirt could not make 
dirty, appealed to him on account of its utter 
helplessness, — and a beetle colored like the rain- 
bow, from which it must have fallen. 

The king of the purple grackles had clearly sent 
out into the high-ways and hedges, and bidden 
all his kith and kin and subjects of every kind, to 
a great supper that was waiting, and was little 
short of royal in its abundance. They were all 
there, and simply took possession of the earth 
and the fullness thereof, — dignified, and almost 
stately, but not too much so to make the most of 
their opportunities. It is in the nature of feasts 
to make outside folks especially conscious of hun- 
ger, and so the robin and the blue-jay came for 
their share; and after them, slipping from cover 
into the furrow, and gone like a sunbeam, was a 
shy brown bird that played the part of Ruth 
among the corn. 

It was a thoroughly tired urchin that dragged 
leaden feet upstairs to bed that night, and found 
the dream-land ship with sails unfurled awaiting 
him. It "geed" and "hawed" a time or two and 
he never knew when it passed the harbor bar and 
glided away into the great ocean of forgetful- 
ness. 

The dawn wind had scarcely commenced to toy 
with the freshness of the June morning, a fresh- 



1 6 What Birds Have Done With Me 

ness augmented by great drops of dew that at 
sun-rise would, for a moment, reflect the sun and 
die in a blaze of glory. Before dawn, the small 
boy was up and dressing on his way down stairs 
to be on hand to help Pete Jackson retrieve the 
oxen from the fastnesses of the great swamp, that 
lay to the northwest. It was quite certain that 
they would go in that direction for water, and the 
lush grass abounding there would meet the re- 
quirements of hunger, and weariness would cir- 
cumscribe their straying to narrow bounds. With 
a rain of dew shaken by the wind from every bush 
and tree, and rank marsh grass dripping with 
water, our sturdy urchin was soon wet to the 
skin, — literally didn't have a dry thread on him. 
But he counted this all joy, and waded shallow 
pools, floundered through deep mire, and would 
have whooped and shouted with delight, had he 
not been afraid of frightening his friends, the 
birds. In countless numbers, to the right and left 
of them, in front and behind them, strange calls 
and rival songs kept him alert to the teeming life 
of the wilderness. Anxious to see and hear them 
all, he was very, very far from realizing that it 
would take a life-time to come to know the life 
history of a few of them, well. 

Bringing the cattle out of the swamp on the 
edge of the highlands, his real education in bird 
lore commenced in earnest. An unusually stupid 



Virgin Soil 17 

brute of an ox that Pete was clubbing along, in- 
stead of going around a brush pile on the edge of 
an old logging road, blundered through it, send- 
ing a mother quail and her callow brood into the 
road at their feet. The mother gave one note of 
warning and the baby quail neither ran nor flew, 
but simply vanished before their very eyes. The 
small boy was sure that the ox had stepped on the 
mother, as she was turning somersaults rather 
than running, so he started after her like a flash, 
and in a minute had her in his hands. Pete, con- 
vulsed with laughter, came to meet him and ex- 
amining the bird found she had lost the first joint 
of every toe, — they probably having been frozen 
off. What had tickled him so much was to see 
the fool thing trying to get them to chase her, 
when she was so "gol-fired" lame that their slow- 
est ox could out-run her. He then, in reply to the 
small boy's question, "Why did she want us to 
chase her?" explained the world-old maneuver of 
certain mother birds to attract human creatures 
away from their nests, and furthermore puzzled 
the small boy by the statement that a quail, if 
she wanted to, could order her chicks to turn into 
dead leaves, — and they did it, too. While the 
explanations had taken place, the lad, holding 
the mother bird in both hands, had been cudgel- 
ling his brain for a name for her. When it came, 
it came like a flash, — "Good Mrs. Stumpy"; — 



1 8 What Birds Have Done With Me 

and he whispered it softly to himself as he almost 
reverentially put her on the ground, and saw her 
vanish into the under-growth. 

Next morning when they went after the cat- 
tle, and for many succeeding mornings, little hands 
scattered wheat along the logging road, for a 
wild bird that had both a local habitation and a 
name. 

Before the end of the week, in which the Lord 
sent him the quail, and he tasted of the tree of 
knowledge at almost the same instant, — isn't that 
a fine mixture? — he did something that goes to 
prove that a little knowledge may be a very dan- 
gerous thing. The breakers were now on the last 
five acres. His interest had not flagged and he 
was still in pursuit of the plow and the oxen. The 
grackles had come to regard him as part of the 
out-fit, and Pete and old Hill proved themselves 
to be fine play-fellows. When a thing happened 
that came very near sending a foolish little boy 
to dwell with those things that live under ground, 
where his father had told him everything would 
finally return. That he escaped being trampled to 
death in the virgin soil in which he had so de- 
lighted, by the very oxen he had driven and petted, 
both Pete and old Hill agreed was nothing short 
of a God's miracle. Swinging around on the 
northeast corner where there was a little sand 
knoll, right under the feet of "Bob" and "Harry," 



Virgin Soil 19 

who were half broken, flighty steers, a gray bird, 
a whip-poor-will, started, more gracefully to be 
sure, to enact the role of "Good Mrs. Stumpy." 
One glance at her, and keeping his eyes on the spot 
where she started her gyrations, the small boy 
dashed under the feet of the cattle, to save the 
nestlings that were surely going to be trampled to 
death. Doubtless only catching a glimpse of him, 
and possibly regarding him, when on all-fours, as 
some new kind of wild animal, the steers began to 
kick and plunge in the utmost terror, and crowd- 
ing the leaders out of the furrow, the two head 
yokes swung around toward the plow, and what 
had been a quiet, orderly breaking team became an 
excited and unmanageable bunch of wild cattle; 
"beginning to mill" with a small boy out of sight 
and in the center of them. According to their 
stories, both Pete and old Hill were the rescuers, 
but whoever did it, pulled out between trampling 
feet, a very dirty and tousled youngster, holding 
a bird in each hand, and wonder of wonders, with 
the exception of some slight bruises, not hurt at 
all. He had given fear no place in his mind, 
entirely taken up with the thought of rescuing 
the helpless, and after all the scolding and the 
final order to keep away from the breaking, not 
then nor ever afterward, could he feel, or would 
he admit, the slightest regret for what he had 
done. 



20 What Birds Have Done With Me 

Only once did he disobey his father's order to 
keep away from the breaking. At an early hour 
the next morning, he hurried out to the field to see 
for himself if the mother bird had found the 
young at the foot of a near-by stump where he 
placed them. Joy of joys, there she was, brood- 
ing them just as though nothing had happened. 
For several days, the lad went about as if he had 
something on his mind, and one evening after 
bidding his mother good-night, he returned, and 
lifting a puzzled face to hers, asked, "Mamma, 
does a fellow have to be a mother before he can 
understand how Mrs. Stumpy and Mrs. Whip- 
poor-will feel, when they ask folks to come and 
kill 'em if they will just leave their babies alone?" 
She had at first smiled, but only for an instant, 
then she gathered him into her arms with un- 
wonted tenderness, and said tremulously, "I guess 
not, my boy, my little boy!" 



CHAPTER II 

MR. TURVEYDROP AND HIS FOREIGN COUSINS 

That beauty is in the eye of the beholder, is 
a half truth, and is a part of a universal law that 
makes a mental condition, the measure of external 
influences upon us. Every artist knows that fifty 
per cent of the effect of a picture is in what may 
be termed background. A painting of Liberty 
enlightening the world, whose background is a 
city market, must of necessity be a failure for the 
subject demands, as background, the ocean and 
the sky. 

Now, it is equally true that we will fail to 
understand the influence of a flock of birds upon 
the mind of the boy, unless we retrace his steps 
far enough to acquaint ourselves with the cir- 
cumstances in which the secret of his mental con- 
dition lay hidden, when he first beheld them. Be- 
tween the age of four and five, he lived for one 
year in the country, then three years in the city, 
hating it all and longing to get back home — back 
to nature. 

Then the return. No angel with a flaming 



22 What Birds Have Done With Me 

sword at the gate, and the gate wide open for 
any one to enter in and take possession. For four 
weeks he believed himself in the Garden of Eden, 
and as a mother hen will try to stretch her wings 
to cover every thing in sight, so the wings of 
his love yearned to gather every living thing be- 
neath them. Joy, joy, joy beneath the tender light 
of a new heaven, and on the warm palpitating 
breast of a new earth, — and then came death and 
all his woes. Is the object of life, to teach by ex- 
perience? Perhaps, for certain it is that we never 
half know a thing till we have thus learned it. 
Many a funeral he had seen in the city, and once, 
visiting a boy who lived near a cemetery, they, 
with a few neighboring boys, had spent half a day 
playing I Spy and hiding behind tombstones, 
but death never really came home to him till he 
looked upon the stark and stiff bodies of some 
little pigs that had actually died in his own Eden. 
Between the house and the barn, early one morn- 
ing, he had met his father, who paused long 
enough to say, "Black Sue has eight babies. Have 
you seen them?" 

He might have said more, but the boy did not 
give him a chance. He was off for the sty, like a 
race horse, and in a moment came staggering back, 
dumb with horror. He had almost run over them, 
for they lay outside the sty all in a row — no cuter 
or more innocent babies under heaven, and all 



Mr. Turveydrop and His Foreign Cousins 23 

quite dead. "No siree," he wouldn't cry. They 
would think him a fool if he cried over dead pigs, 
and never understand that it wasn't over the pigs, 
but was because he had just learned that it was 
possible for things to die in Eden. He and Sid 
took them over to the sand hill and buried them 
in eight separate graves ; but toward night, when 
the boy thought about it, it seemed cruel to have 
separated them in death, so he got Sid, and they 
went back and dug a single grave — it was easy 
digging — and, lining it well with dead leaves, they 
snuggled them up together and covered them well 
with leaves, then the dirt; which was all a fellow 
could do. 

Three days after this, he returned with his 
mother from a visit to the hated city, to find that 
his yearling heifer, Rosie, Cherry's calf, was dead, 
and his brother and the hired man had just skinned 
her, and were about to bury her on the sand hill 
where he and Sid had buried the little pigs. He 
ran to the barn — he had scarcely believed it could 
be true, but perhaps it was — but when he got 
there, he could not recognize the ghastly thing 
that lay there, with a chain around its neck, whose 
glassy eyes had in them no look of recognition. 
He followed the team that dragged the body be- 
side the hole in the ground, into which they rolled 
it, in a hurry, jumping on the feet to bend them 
down so they would not stick out of the dirt when 



24 What Birds Have Done With Me 

the hole was filled up ; all the time laughing and 
talking about a dance that had taken place the 
night before. He declined to ride one of the 
horses, so they each mounted one and rode away, 
and left him. If he could have cried it would have 
been a lot better. He had had to battle with him- 
self not to cry over the little pigs, but this loss 
left him dry-eyed and staring. There really had 
been a witchery about Rosie, in life, that possibly 
went a very little way to strengthen the old classic 
myth that Dido was actually turned into such a 
Heifer. Over all his domestic pets, she had 
reigned supreme. He did not refuse his dinner, 
but refused to wash his hands and face. 'Way 
back in his subconsciousness was a vague feeling 
that for him to be too clean, when she was smoth- 
ered with dirt, would be a kind of disloyalty. 
Then, for a few days, loyalty to her made him 
welcome every dirty job about the place, and sin- 
cere grief had the effect of transforming a natu- 
rally cleanly little fellow, into a very dirty and 
unkempt one. In a nut-shell, here is what he had 
in his mind; he had learned in Sunday school that 
man was made out of the dust of the earth — it 
must have been mud or it would not have stuck 
together — in death, we go back into the dirt; 
what's the use to keep clean? 

This represents his condition of both mind and 
body, on that May morning when he saw his first 



Mr. Turveydrop and His Foreign Cousins 25 

flock of cedar Waxwings, among the blossoms of 
the wild crab apple trees, along the drive. They 
were a revelation of beauty and a rebuke to the 
unwashed and unkempt of the human family. In 
a wide sense, they were of the earth, but not of 
the dirt. He could not describe, he could only 
feel. Later on, he might have said, "Architecture 
has been called 'frozen poetry,' and my first 
glimpse of them made me dimly understand that 
I was looking upon incarnate poetry — They were 
the living, breathing spirit of harmony that is 
back of all musical expression." That they were 
feeding upon blossoms gave him a feeling that 
they were scarcely of the earth, surely not earthy 
of the earth. Other birds were covered with 
feathers; these were robed, uniformed, appareled 
by a master hand. Compared to them, many 
other birds were frumps, and even a gorgeous 
red and green parrot, little more than an Irish 
woman out for a holiday. So far as clothes went 
with them, every day was Sunday, for they wore 
their best three hundred and sixty-five days in the 
year, and like the smile of Optimism, they were as 
near perpetual as anything can be in a world of 
change. Being convinced that they were going to 
remain, he did not, but made a sneak for the 
kitchen and scrubbed his hands and face, combed 
his hair, brushed his clothes, got a straw hat that 
did not have a hole in the crown, and having done 



26 ' What Birds Have Done With Me 

his best to make himself fit for polite society, he 
went back. 

Years afterward, on a drowsy Sabbath day, he 
found himself listening to a frowsy little parson 
droning over a sermon from the text, "Keep your- 
selves unspotted from the world," and sweeping 
the window from the central blue of illimitable 
space, came the same old crab apple tree, where 
he had seen them first, and the identical flock of 
Waxwings, and he smiled to himself as he thought, 
"Any one of you smug fellows could give this poor 
little human, spades and trumps, and beat him in 
a sermon on this text, for at least you would look 
the part." One of the first reader lessons in life 
they were created to teach, they had thus neatly 
delivered to the boy, and he had made a personal 
application thereof, with soap and brush, and 
was now back for a second reader lesson. He did 
not have long to wait. The second reader class, 
and he was it, was ordered to take up the study 
of certain wax figures, representing deportment. 

That a certain thing has been done in a certain 
way, time out of mind, is no reason that it should 
be continued; neither is there any sense in not 
trying a thing, simply because it never has been 
done. In the antiquated, rutty schools, in which 
humanity in its youth is guarded from learning 
any thing about the wonder world in which it has 
its being, it is customary for one individual to 



Mr. Turveydrop and His Foreign Cousins 27 

teach a class, but with the Wax-wings, to whom 
owls might go to school to their considerable 
profit, this is all reversed, and the class teaches 
the individual. Lady Clara, we have guessed your 
secret; we know where you got that repose that 
stamps the cast of Vere de Vere. To the Four 
Hundred of New York, we send this challenge : in 
a contest on Deportment, we will wager a hundred 
to one, and enter four Wax-wings against your en- 
tire bunch, and if you are not beaten, in addition 
to the loss of our wager, we will throw Turvey- 
drop et al. into bankruptcy. We are not afraid of 
being beaten, for with the Wax-wings, deportment 
is a fashion and a passion ; and if you must know 
it, a trust that can never be dissolved, by any 
court lower than the Supreme Court of the Uni- 
verse. Long years afterward, when the boy had 
grown to manhood, and had married and had a 
boy of his own, during an Easter vacation, he 
took him down to Mill's swamp in a search for 
early spring Migrants, and the first birds to be 
encountered were a flock of twenty-one Wax- 
wings, who are winter residents with us. They 
were, as always, on dress parade, and quite as 
bright and shining as the sun. Don't think me 
sacrilegious if I say that it was Communion Sab- 
bath with them, for I don't mean it in either a 
religious or an irreligious way when I call atten- 
tion to one of the most curious customs in the 



28 What Birds Have Done With Me 

bird kingdom. The bird at the head of the line 
will pass a worm to his next neighbor, and he to 
his neighbor, till it has made the rounds of every 
bird in the flock, and has been returned to the one 
whose find it was, who proceeds to partake of it 
in a slow and sedate and decorous fashion, calcu- 
lated to delight the heart of Dr. Fletcher. On 
higher ground, not twenty feet from the gaunt 
elm on which they were perched, the man and boy 
were having something like an interview with the 
birds, and the man was curious as to the effect of 
it on the mind of the boy. He did not have long 
to wait; in the flippant style of the average col- 
lege youth came the comment. "Dad, don't you 
think these birds awfully stuck on themselves?" 
"Perhaps," came the rejoinder, "but in an age 
when misrule is the rule, rather than the excep- 
tion, and Flippancy with his cap and bells marches 
through the land, past the seats of the mighty 
and up to the very throne of God, it's high time 
for us to learn a needful lesson of a bird that 
can always be trusted to do things decently and 
in order." There was a merry twinkle in the 
young fellow's eyes as he put his arm almost 
caressingly on his father's shoulder, and said, "I 
wanted to get a rise out of you, and that was the 
reason I threw the bait." 

The Bohemian Wax-wing, a first cousin to the 
Cedar Wax-wing, is a cosmopolitan fellow, and his 



Mr. Turveydrop and His Foreign Cousins 29 

visits are few and far between, but unlike angels' 
visits, they were formerly thought to presage war, 
pestilence, and famine — though, of course, it goes 
without the saying that in reality they had no 
more connection with the coming of such public 
calamities than the striking of your grandfath- 
er's clock. Mysterious and unusual things in the 
minds of people who haven't a thimble full of 
sense, always spell evil or devil. In later times, 
the Bohemian Wax-wing has been called the 
Seven-year Bird, but his ways are too erratic to 
be held down to human observation. 

Not so long ago one of these birds of mystery 
gave up his life at the hands of a tender hearted 
old man, whose eyes grow dimmer, day by day; 
and in spite of the fact that it was an accident, 
the ghost of the dead bird is likely to follow him 
to the very end of life's journey. Every body 
knows what a pest the English sparrow is, and 
it had grown quite unbearable to the man. It 
could not be kept out of his Martins' house, it 
ate the food he provided for his winter birds, and 
fairly swarmed about an old cedar hedge not 
four rods from his office window. One day, quite 
forgetting all the lessons on deportment taught 
him by the Cedar Wax-wing, he lost his temper, 
and taking a gun, that he had not fired for years, 
he stepped to the door and fired into the hedge 
alive with English sparrows. Only one bird fell, 



30 What Birds Have Done With Me 

and when he picked it up, — Oh, cruel spite! — it 
was a Bohemian Wax-wing : he, the last of all men 
on earth had reduced this rare and beautiful thing 
to supper for a cat, or a bit of carrion, the day- 
after. That was unbearable, and without the least 
knowledge of what final disposition he was to 
make of it, he sent the body to a neighboring town 
to a taxidermist to be mounted. What a queer no- 
tion it is, that to some extent is in us all, that 
penance of one kind or another will help us to 
right a wrong, or correct a mistake. Acting as 
an attorney for all birds, he gave an earnest ap- 
peal to a large audience of school children to 
spare the birds, and not till on his way to the 
station and in front of the shop of the taxidermist, 
did he remember that it was here where he had 
sent the Wax-wing to be stuffed. He only had 
a moment, and acting on impulse he ran in, paid 
for the work, took out his card across which was 
printed in heavy type, "A friend of the Birds," 
and above his name wrote, "Killed by the donor 
January 13, 19 13," and ordered it sent up to the 
School Collection of stuffed birds. Even after 
he had thought it over, he said to himself, "Yes, 
I richly deserve to have Mr. Turvey-drop's for- 
eign cousin announce to all those children that I 
am a hypocrite," but after sleeping on it, he whis- 
pered to himself, on waking, "Being a Bohemian 
Wax-wing, perhaps he will make the announce- 
ment in French or German, and not in English." 



CHAPTER III 

MOTHERLESS BABIES 

Adolph Buzze was a Canadian wood-chopper, 
the only one left of a gang of his country-men 
who had helped denude the township, where the 
small boy lived, of the primeval forest; all the 
rest had drifted north and westward on the skir- 
mish line of advancing settlement. To the small 
boy, Adolph became a guide, philosopher, and 
friend, and to him, he owed all his boyish knowl- 
edge of wood-craft. Born in the woods, always 
living in the woods, with eyes of wonder for every 
thing passing about him, his knowledge of wood- 
folks and wood-land ways was remarkable; now 
add to this, wonderful gaity, cheerfulness and 
perpetual laughter, and you have a personality 
calculated to take captive the heart of a child. 
His limited knowledge of English, added to, 
rather than detracted from, the charm of his con- 
versation. Here are a few examples. Pointing 
to the criss-crossing of all manner of wild animal 
tracks in the snow, he would say at the end of a 
ripple and laughter: 

31 



32 What Birds Have Done With Me 

"Now, watch ze me read primer book in right 
tune," and he would unravel the tangle. Again, 
pointing to where a fox had made a long leap; 
"He say Adolph go buy more long leg." A duck's 
track would call forth this, or something like it; 
"When I try fly, fool like duck walk." 

What he did not know about every living thing 
in the wilderness, the small boy did not think 
worth knowing. He was always eager to initiate 
his pupil into new mysteries, — even to the eat- 
ing of a rye-bread sandwich, with frozen ants 
between the slices, — followed with shouts of 
laughter that woke the echoes, when he got a 
glimpse of the small boy's face, after swallowing 
the first mouthful. How can I convey any ade- 
quate idea of the perpetual delight of Adolph's 
cabin, dug into a sharp southern slope, with only 
two logs and the slope of its roof to mock at the 
north wind that went howling by in impotent 
rage? Lying on a bear skin, of a winter night, 
before the pulsating red glory of blazing logs, 
listening to Adolph's fiddle that told its own story 
of life in the woods, from the earliest chirp of 
half-awakened birds to the raucous screech of a 
catamount; music so wonderful that it fairly sent 
a thrill of swaying motion up among the skins of 
animals hanging near the rooftree of the unceiled 
room. To this, add marvelous jig dancing, French 
songs without number, and stories without end, 



Motherless Babies 33 

about the old smooth bore rifle with which his 
grandfather had killed a whole tribe of Indians, 
single-handed, up in Canada, — not to mention a 
thousand elk, a thousand bear, a thousand caribou 
and buffalo, lynx, and wolves, more numerous 
than the stars in the sky. Swans, geese, ducks, 
partridges, pigeons, squirrels, and rabbits, he him- 
self had gathered in, in numbers beyond the drops 
of water in the ocean. Wonder of wonders, it 
was with this almost sacred gun that Adolph 
taught him to shoot. The instruction was very 
excellent, "Hold ze gun down, bring ze gun up, 
shoot ze quick." The world nearly went topsy- 
turvy when one day, meeting the little French- 
man with a load of wood, beneath which his old 
wagon had gone to pieces like the "wonderful 
shay," he said to him, 

"Ze tell father, I trade ze rifle for ze green 
wagon. I even trade quick." 

He never knew what he said in reply, but study- 
ing a Sunday school lesson that night, that hap- 
pened to be about Jacob and Esau, he had a clear 
vision of what Adolph had offered to do; trade 
his birthright for a mess of pottage. When 
Adolph had made the proposition, he had thought 
him mad, and had not even mentioned it to his 
father, and he could scarcely believe his ears at 
dawn the next day, when he heard Adolph's voice 
in the yard, talking trade with his father. 



34 What Birds Have Done With Me 

He heard him say, "Ze boy shoot ze gun good; 
good gun make ze good man. No draw chip with 
ze gun, trade, draw ze chip with ze wagon." 

The small boy let no grass grow under his feet 
getting down stairs, but before he got there, the 
trade had been made. Adolph had traded his 
birth-right for the miserable, worn-out, old demo- 
crat wagon. Shrieking after Adolph that he could 
shoot it whenever he wanted to, when his father 
handed him the gun, he hugged it to his breast 
and made for his room — literally with a heart too 
full for utterance. Driving a couple of nails in 
the wall at the foot of his bed, he hung the gun 
where he could see it the last thing at night and 
the first thing in the morning, and it strangely sup- 
plemented the influence of "Anderson's Travels 
in Africa." Like a witch on a broom-stick, the 
small boy rode that gun through the darkest cor- 
ners of the Dark Continent, and became a killer 
compared to whom Samson with his ass's jaw- 
bone was superseded. In his dreams, he shot up 
the world and all things therein, and like Alex- 
ander, wept that there were no more worlds to 
shoot up. The dawn's first flush and the last red 
banner in the evening sky, stood as marking the 
place where rivers of blood flowed. It was a lucky 
thing that the owner of the "Green Book," "An- 
derson's Travels in Africa," did not come to claim 
it, especially had he not been willing to take a 



Motherless Babies 35 

small boy as well as the book, for he could scarcely 
have separated them. There must be some scien- 
tific, some psychological explanation of the effect 
of this old gun and the bloody account of killing 
big game in Africa, upon the mind of a naturally 
tender-hearted little chap. Without at all claim- 
ing to be a "Daniel come to judgment," here is a 
possible explanation. In every human heart is a 
desire for conquest, dominion; the gun gives us 
dominion over savage nature, — the power of life 
and death — the very attribute of kings. Add to 
this, the joy of the chase, a reversion to a savage 
ancestor and the universal lust to kill becomes less 
mysterious. There being no elephants, or lions 
within range, he had to content himself with the 
smaller things that the forests of his own coun- 
try afforded, insignificant though they were. The 
first time he shot the head off a red-winged black- 
bird, flaunting on a cat-tail, a hundred yards away, 
cutting it away with a bullet, he seemed to grow 
a foot ; eleven gophers with ten bullets, put him in 
the ranks with "Simon Kenton," that grand In- 
dian fighter who never missed. The shooting of 
Abe Brulley's sheep-killing dog, at twenty rods, 
taken red-handed, so to speak, and he had con- 
quered the earth and must now turn his attention 
to the sky for worlds to be subdued. Once more, 
he turned to Adolph for help. 

"Want learn shoot on wing? Easy 'nuf. Hold 



36 What Birds Have Done With Me 

gun under, bring gun up, shoot ze quick. Thou- 
san' misses tell how fast each bird go quick. Easy 
W." 

So far, the old smooth bore had been used as 
a rifle only, not with fixed ammunition, thank you, 
but powder from a flask, a piece of muslin for a 
patch, and bullets run from spoons that his sisters 
someway lost in setting the table. A half day's 
work for Culver, hoeing corn, and he had am- 
munition for wing-shooting that ought to last 
a week. 

Two of their colts had wandered away and 
were with a band of neighbors' colts down at 
Hamilton's Point. The thought of the way they 
might be suffering touched a tender spot in the 
small boy's gizzard, and he was almost tearful 
as he begged his father to allow him to go and 
salt them. He likely would have wept had his 
father not given his consent, for if the truth must 
be known, he could not wait another day to try 
wing-shooting. The gun was already hidden in 
a fence corner out near the little woods, for his 
father had clearly repented of his trade with 
Adolph, and had shown himself strongly antago- 
nistic to his son's evident ambition to become a 
mighty hunter. On one point, he was inflexible, 
no wild things must be killed in the breeding sea- 
son, hence the gun in the fence-corner. Indeed, 
there are few things as rare as a day in June, 



Motherless Babies 37 

and never had a brighter one dawned, to make 
glad the earth. If the small boy hadn't had the 
gun, perhaps he wouldn't have felt so much like 
flying, but if it were the cause of that wild ex- 
uberance, it held it in check by its own weight, 
that pretty effectually kept his feet on the earth. 
Only one more field to cross, and he would be 
out on the Point, over which ducks flew between 
the Lake and inlet, and he would have a try at 
them, and get them, too, and people would say 
of him as they said of Simon Kenton, "Our hunter 
never misses." No, that was almost too much 
to hope, — that he could ever really gain such 
deathless fame. There had been a law-suit over 
this land, and the previous year it had not been 
cultivated at all, but had grown up to weeds, 
higher than his head. Suddenly, a great bird 
got up almost at his feet. It seems as though 
the little Frenchman is at his elbow telling him 
what to do, and he does it like a flash, and down 
comes the dead thing — not four yards away. Yes, 
it was like Kenton, he, too, was destined to have 
that glorious reputation, "Our hunter never 
missed." But what are these gray shadows at 
his feet, living things turning into dead leaves, as 
Pete Jackson had told him Baby Quail could. All 
this he sees out of the tail of his eye, as he rushes 
to gather up his prize. A Prairie Chicken, — 
not bad for a first wing-shot, brother Kenton? — - 



38 What Birds Have Done With Me 

but, as he turns it over, its bare breast throws a 
flood of light on the living things turning into 
dead leaves, at a note of warning from the mother 
bird that he has killed. Instantly, he is in a panic, 
a revulsion of feeling sweeps over him that will 
break his heart unless he can do something to 
stay its fury. Away goes the gun, and the salt 
out of the pail, and he is down on his knees 
searching everywhere for the motherless chicks. 
They elude him, like the phantom shadows we 
pursue in unhappy dreams. His thought had 
been to capture them all, and put them in the salt 
pail and carry them home to be mothered by a 
hen; for he knew that old Spot, who wanted to 
mother the kitten when the hawks carried away 
her own chicks, would take them all. He went 
over the ground again and again, and when search 
had to be abandoned as hopeless, he had one chick 
that he had stepped on with his bare foot and 
crushed its life out. When he dropped the dead 
mother to pursue the young, she had fallen on 
her back with her pitiful naked breast still oozing 
blood, calling to the God of all mercies, the small 
boy thought, for vengeance. Putting the dead 
baby bird upon the pulseless bosom of its mother, 
he cast himself down beside both, — a forlorn 
little Cain, who could find no place of repentance 
though he sought it with tears. A couple of 
lines that Kipling wrote long afterward, came 



Motherless Babies 39 

nearer than anything else ever written to voicing 
the speechless agony of his soul. 

"Till I lay with naught to hide me, 
'Neath the Scorn of All Things Made." 

It must have been to save him from this sense 
of blood guiltiness that his father had forbidden 
all shooting in the breeding season. To do what 
he had done was a crime that the good deeds of 
a life-time would scarcely over balance or ex- 
piate. A sense of the meanness and shame of 
it grew as he buried the mother and the crushed 
chick in the same little grave, dug by his naked 
hands — hands that seemed anxious to cover up 
the stain of blood with the stain of earth. He 
never looked up the colts ; making that the object 
of the expedition had been a lie, and this is what 
it had brought him, — a lasting stain on his very 
soul. It was not the gun's fault, he thought, as 
he shouldered it and started the longest way 
around to reach home, trudging dully along, feel- 
ing that its dead weight was a kind of an expia- 
tion. It was long after dark when he reached 
home, and hiding the gun in the granary, he crept 
supperless up to bed. He undressed by fierce 
flashes of lightning that kept nearly a continuous 
blaze in the room, and they proved the precursor 
of wind, rain, and hail that swept the earth and 
also the shuddering soul of the small boy that 



40 What Birds Have Done With Me 

was out in all the- tempest struggling in vain, to 
shield from the merciless fury of the elements, 
the helpless things whose mother he had ruth- 
lessly slain. Rain and years wash out many 
things, but the June day that went down in black- 
ness, and the night of storm following, left an 
ineffaceable sense of shame and regret that would 
only pass with the mouldering back to dust of the 
brain upon which it was stamped. 

When the very next day his two doves, leaving 
a pair of young birds at home, flew down to the 
village and were seen picking up grain around 
the mill, and were promptly shot by Dr. Coffee, 
the small boy felt that his crime was not to pass 
unnoticed. Had he been aware of the fact com- 
mented on by Shakespeare so many years ago, 
when he wrote of sucking doves, he need not have 
felt so bad when his squabs both died for want 
of the predigested food they get from their par- 
ents. About the only fun that the small boy had 
at this time was the joy of hating Dr. Coffee, and 
there is a good bit of evidence, of a circumstan- 
tial character, that would indicate that he never 
fully forgave him for killing his doves in the 
breeding season. To be sure, he had shot the 
Prairie Chicken, but he didn't know any better 
and there was no excuse of that kind to mitigate 
the crime of Dr. Coffee, and he would get his 
punishment either in this world or the next. For 



Motherless Babies 41 

many years, he had a secret hope that every 
crowd started by an evangelist for the everlasting 
burning, was headed by this enormously fat Doc- 
tor, who would have burned grandly; and when 
the small boy not only a man himself, but one 
growing old, encountered old Dr. Coffee, deafer 
than an adder, and boarding at a hotel, because 
he was too ugly to live with his children, and 
actually feeing the night-clerk, every night, to pull 
him out of bed in case of a fire alarm that he 
would never hear, he not only was not sorry but 
he grinned from ear to ear, still remembering 
the doves. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE KEEPER OF THE SPRING-HOUSE 

Directly in front of a new summer hotel on 
a hill, and across a public road on the margin of 
the lake, was a cheap and impromptu spring 
house. 

It had a gabled roof, was about six by eight 
in size, and was closed in with lattice work, with 
the exception of a place for a door on the road 
side. The simple affair was scarcely finished, 
when the roof was taken possession of by a Belted 
Kingfisher, who became known somewhat widely 
as "The Keeper of the Spring-house," the name 
probably growing out of the fact that he was 
rarely caught off duty, from early spring till late 
in the fall. In a figurative way, it might be said 
of him that he both opened and closed the season; 
arriving ahead of the south wind and the first 
shy violets, rollicking through the summer and 
painted October, and saying a reluctant farewell 
when the north wind chased a cloud of reluctant 
snow flakes into the black and sullen waters of 
the lake. 

42 



The Keeper of the Spring-House 43 

He took possession without so much as, by 
your leave, taking the liberty of an old friend, — 
for he and the man had known each other all 
their lives and what could be more natural, now 
that the man had a big house of his own, than 
his building a cheap summer affair for a long- 
time friend? Anyway the man never questioned 
his ownership, and how the Kingfisher hated the 
small boy who did. If he had any system of 
Theology, he must have classified all boys as the 
devil's imps from the bottomless pit. They in- 
vaded twice a day, before nine in the morning 
and shortly after four in the afternoon, his house, 
and actually attacked the keeper — assaulting him 
with volleys of stones. He shrieked his hatred 
and impotent rage at them and retreated, routed 
by an army of devils; but if they had all been of 
his size, he would have watched his chance and 
captured them, one by one, and tearing them limb 
from limb, fed them to his own nestlings. 

He did not hate the man, and indeed he had no 
reason to, for neither he nor any of his family 
had ever received anything but kindness at his 
hands. To be sure, there was a time, when he 
had been a boy, and came very near acting like 
all boys ; but in a way he had never been young, — 
if thoughtlessness is the universal badge of youth 
— for even his boyish pranks had been seasoned 
with a consideration for the rights of living 



44 What Birds Have Done With Me 

things, that is not always, alas, characteristic of 
mature age. Every Kingfisher on the Lake 
knows to this day, how he and his brother had 
worked for nearly a whole day to dig out a 
grand-father and grand-mother Kingfishers' nest 
in the high bank near "Gray Rock," and then and 
there repented of their evil deeds, and spent a 
half day longer to repair the injury they had done. 
There is an old and truly scientific saying, that all 
life comes from an egg, and perhaps it is a sub- 
conscious curiosity, that in some way never leaves 
us, about the origin of life, that makes a natural 
nest robber of every child. Though only eight 
and ten years old, they were wiser than the an- 
cients, if there be truth to the story that they 
called the Kingfisher a Halcyon, and thought it 
made its nest on the water in stormless periods, 
from which the term "Halcyon days" has come 
down to us. How these urchins would have 
laughed at, and exulted over, those old worthies 
if they had known of the myth. To think that 
they could never find a single nest when the boys 
knew of three or four — what boobies they must 
have been — it is likely that we fail to give an idea 
of the scorn they would have felt and expressed 
picturesquely. 

My, but the sun was red hot, and had his eye 
directly upon them, when they settled down at 
the lure of a possible white egg, whose existence 



The Keeper of the Spring-House 45 

so far was hearsay, to dig their way back in a 
gravelly soil, with a worn-out fire shovel, till the 
treasure should be revealed, a reward of both 
merit and labor, a veritable prize, for barring the 
eggs of the oriole ; no others were so hard to get. 
Their education had not proceeded far enough 
so they could get the stimulus of knowing that 
they were digging like "badgers" — the animal on 
the coat of arms of their state — which was the 
fact; but it is doubtful if even that creature, whose 
burrowing ability is undoubted, would have as- 
sayed a tunnel in the kind of soil in which they 
were working. That beastly fire-shovel — they 
quickly christened it "Mr. Angleworm," for it 
would double up in their hands and twist in any 
direction, except straight ahead, when they at- 
tempted to force it any distance in the stubborn, 
sticky clay. They had scarcely half finished their 
task, when they noticed that the sun no longer 
looked squarely down upon them, but was watch- 
ing them from over his right shoulder, to the west. 
They had had no dinner but they did not know it. 
They had forgotten the cries of the old birds, 
were unmindful of their blistered hands, — in fact, 
those hands only itched for one thing, the joy of 
grasping the white egg, that could be only a little 
way ahead. They had been carrying the dirt out 
in their hats, but they could do that no longer, 
for they had commenced to strike pellets that 



46 What Birds Have Done With Me 

reeked of corruption, and made them sick at the 
stomach. Necessity is the Mother of invention, 
— when they could no longer use their hats, they 
tore the lining from the sleeve of an old jacket 
they found on the shore, knotted it at one end and 
had a sack for their dirt. The horrible, pesti- 
lential odor got worse and worse; it strangled, 
throttled them, and they could neither quit nor 
go on. A merciful providence took the matter 
out of their hands; they suddenly heard noises at 
the end of the tunnel, and using both hands as a 
telescope, beyond a field of carrion fish-bones, they 
could see the heads and open mouths of young 
birds. One glance into each other's eyes, and 
impelled by a common impulse, they fell over 
each other in their efforts to get out of their 
tunnel, they rolled over each other in their haste 
to get down the bank and bury their perspiring 
faces in the friendly water. It was delicious: 
stripping off shirt and trousers, they plunged in 
bodily, and like a good nurse in sickness, the lake 
bathed their bodies, — cooling the blood that for 
hours had been almost at fever heat and washing 
away the grime from face and hands — but the 
odor in their nostrils seemed beyond her, and did 
not pass for hours; not, in fact, till sleep, the 
great restorer, came with her poppy juice, that 
wipes away the world and all things therein. 
It began to thunder before morning, and the 



The Keeper of the Spring-House 47 

first peal roused the "Deacon/' and if he had not, 
in fact, dreamed about them, his first waking 
thought was a confused jumble of young Prairie 
Chickens and young Kingfishers at the mercy of 
the elements. If it rained and the water rushed 
down that bank, they would be drowned. They, 
the nest robbers, were responsible. Their duty 
was clear; it meant he and Hod to the rescue. 
He roused his brother, never mind whether it 
was by threats or promises, and it was getting 
light when they stole out of the house to pilfer 
two lengths of stove pipe from the granary, got 
a spade, and headed for the lake at a rate called 
by military tacticians, a forced march. The two 
lengths when joined together were a little too 
long, but when a fellow was doing the best he 
could, what more could be expected of him ! They 
talked it over on their way back to the rescue. 
How could they know that they would find young 
birds? — and they wouldn't, either, if those fool 
parents hadn't been in such a hurry about getting 
to house-keeping. When they finally got the 
stove-pipe in place, — just where the old tunnel 
had been, and the earth well packed around it, — 
they couldn't stay to see if the birds would use it 
or not, for what had threatened to be a thunder 
shower, proved a deluge, and they had to seek 
refuge among the trees of the Seminary Land. 
It was nearly a week, before they got back to 



48 What Birds Have Done With Me 

examine their handiwork, and to their delight 
they saw the mother bird perched on the end of 
the length of stove-pipe, — at peace with all the 
world. This was before she spied the boys — or 
we could never have used that reference to peace. 
In view of all their labors, they felt rather sur- 
prised at the nature of the blessing she was call- 
ing down upon their heads; but what boy ever 
took anything to heart, in the way of personal 
abuse! Soon they were laughing at her, and as 
boys never feel real well acquainted with a thing 
till they have given it a new name, they forthwith 
christened her "Stove-pipe Jinny"; and when the 
Papa bird put in an appearance, they dubbed him 
"Gluey Bill." How boys get names for things is 
not easy to tell, but in the name of "Gluey Bill," 
the reference is obvious enough. The furniture 
at home had come from Pennsylvania, and at the 
last end of the journey had been drawn by ox 
team over seventy miles of corduroy road; hence 
the glue pot, that never was known to smell like 
a flower, was among the household gods, — and 
the Kingfisher's nest had every such odor on earth 
beaten to a frazzle. Surely the Divine Goodness 
must have withheld from the baby Kingfisher, 
olfactory glands — or that goodness may be ques- 
tioned. From "Gluey Bill," the name, through 
some natural stage of contraction, became 
"Gooey Bill," and her name "Jinny Pipe," — and 



The Keeper of the Spring-House 49 

so they will remain to man's last syllable of 
recorded time. 

Shade of Ike Walton, as a fisherman in com- 
parison to either "Jinny Pipe" or "Gooey Bill," 
you are as a pollywog to a whale. "Patience on 
a monument," come and hire yourself out as an 
understudy to the "Keeper of the Spring-house." 
All American Eagles, in the name of common 
honesty, I call upon you to dissolve your robbers' 
trust, and come and learn from "Gooey Bill" how 
to get a living on the square; "The Keeper of 
the Spring-house" would scorn seines, snag lines 
or phantom bait, — nothing under-handed about 
him. In the gray of the morning, when he comes 
sweeping down the shore from the bluffs along 
Sherwood Forest, he is sounding his rattle all the 
way, and when he hits the roof at his old fishing- 
place, he calls to all the little fishes, "Here I am, 
and it's to be a fair fight and no favor." When 
I read how the Psalmist said all fishermen are 
liars, then my Kingfisher is my refuge and a very 
present help in trouble; 'tis the "Keeper of the 
Spring-house" who has made it possible for me 
to find a sermon in a fisherman, and consequently 
good in everything. 

Once upon a time the Man's Wife and little 
daughter, with a party of friends, were out in a 
little gasoline boat, and when they started away 
the skies were as sweet as Tennyson's "Dream of 



50 What Birds Have Done With Me 

Fair Women," but when rounding "Norwegian 
Bay," on their way home, the engine stopped and 
a sudden gale struck them the same instant. 
There is no bottom to the lake along the rocks at 
"Lone Tree," toward which the frail craft was 
being carried. On the other side of "Sugar 
Loaf," which is a promontory, the Steamer 
"Queen of the Lake," was also making for home 
with her load of passengers, — among whom was 
a Bird-Lover watching the shore with a pair of 
opera glasses. Suddenly coming directly from 
the shore toward the steamer, she saw a King- 
fisher, and circling, within ten feet of it, he 
uttered an alarm cry and flew toward "Lone 
Tree." Watching the bird, she saw the signals 
of distress from the gasoline boat, — and the 
steamer put about and arrived just in time for a 
neat and spectacular rescue. 

When the man heard the story of how the 
Kingfisher had seemingly called attention to the 
imminent wreck, he with the rest made light of 
it; but as a matter of fact, he added it to certain 
fancies long hidden in his heart, and as he tells 
them now, he wonders if any one will really un- 
derstand. To him, all Kingfishers are related 
to "Jinny Pipe" and "Gooey Bill" ; they are a part 
of his youth, and have their place among his early 
play-mates. The Kingfisher to the rescue, was 
just a coincidence, but a mighty pleasant thing 



The Keeper of the Spring-House 51 

to remember about an old friend, all the same. 
He doesn't pretend to know what such a bird may 
stand for in your life, and he couldn't make you 
understand all it stands for in his. But it's not 
the Robin or the Blue-bird that is the first to 
announce to him that Winter has finally capitu- 
lated, and is in full retreat; this news comes from 
the exultant rattle of the Kingfisher, causing the 
child's heart within the man, to start and trem- 
ble, and the welcome he extends is always quite 
voiceless, for it is only his heart that says, "Hello, 
'Jinny Pipe'; Hello, 'Gooey Bill.'" And when 
the summer is over and gone, and October's last 
picture has faded and the tubes are twisted and 
dried, his heart in voiceless farewell always says, 
"Good-bye, 'Jinny Pipe'; Good-bye, 'Gooey 
Bill,' " and the talk about the "Keeper of the 
Spring-house" at such a moment seems as a tale 
that is told. 



CHAPTER V 

WINGS, WINGS, WINGS 

Naturally enough we have been so intoxicated 
with the splendors of the civilization coming to 
the wilderness of Wisconsin, in a little over half 
a century, that we have had ears for no adverse 
criticism, and eyes for no visions of havoc, piti- 
less destruction, and wide desolation wrought by 
our conquering world God. We willingly ad- 
mit that it seems to be the established order of 
the Universe that for something to live, some- 
thing must die; however, such an admission does 
in no way take from us the natural and inalienable 
right to protest to such a law, fundamental though 
it be. Civilization not only takes toll of all 
weaker forms of life that stand in its way; it does 
more, it exterminates, it annihilates, and its word 
has gone out to all the wild life on the face of the 
earth: "Where I am, there ye cannot be." 

Strangely enough, the small boy seemed to have 

some dim sense of this, for he had a feeling that 

the passers in the sky must have his attention first, 

— over the things that had a local and nearby 

52 



Wings, Wings, Wings S3 

home, Ah! those myriad things that came out 
of the southern sky in the spring and disappeared, 
always flying north, — would they ever come back? 
It seemed unlikely, and in his soul was the fore- 
boding fear that the hour drew on apace when 
his eyes would search the desolation of vast fields 
of space and find no passing wing. It had been 
the great flocks, spring and fall — especially spring 
— that had taught him his A.B.C's of migration, 
The native, home birds that would be gone to- 
day and back to-morrow — with no appearance of 
ever having been away — scarcely suggested it; 
but the countless millions going by in the light 
of the sun, often darkening it like a cloud, — 
coming from nowhere, and disappearing into no- 
where — these were the obvious migrants, these 
the real world voyagers. The wings, the wings, 
the wings that gave a living thing the emancipa- 
tion from the earth enjoyed by a cloud, the speed 
of the wind, and enabled them to traverse high- 
ways whose only street lamps were the stars, — 
for he heard them going by in the night. 

The living cloud from the sky that had struck 
him dumb that first spring, had been a vast flock 
of Passenger Pigeons. Clearly they had no fear 
of the little tad standing on a hill alone, and 
swept by, not a dozen feet above his head, with 
the sound of a rushing, mighty wind ; and both the 
wind and the sound were real enough, for the 



54 What Birds Have Done With Me 

one left him bare-headed, and the other half 
deafened him; and fear gripped his heart lest, in 
what seemed the onward rush of all things, the 
wings would carry him away. How beautiful 
they were, how graceful, — many had the flush of 
both the dawn and the evening sky on their breast, 
and the eyes with which they looked at you were 
fearless and full of confidence. No one knew it 
at that time but they constituted America's one 
characteristic "Moving Picture" — that all the 
countless billions of money since produced by our 
Civilization could not now replace. But more 
than this; let us suppose the physician of one of 
our multi-millionaires, J. Pierpont Morgan, said 
to be dying at Rome, had ordered for him a Pas- 
senger Pigeon, as the one thing that would save 
his life, the expenditure of his entire fortune, of 
fifty millions, would not have obtained it for him. 
This was the bird that the early settler netted, 
trapped, pounded from the roost by wagon loads 
and fed to hogs and used as fertilizer, and slaugh- 
tered and left where they fell to rot. Under the 
old Mosaic Law, a young, domestic Pigeon might 
be offered up as a sacrifice for sin, but the Civil- 
ization that we are expected to teach our children 
to regard as splendid, allowed all our wild 
pigeons to be sacrificed for naught; and the shame 
of their destruction should evermore be chronicled 
among our national sins. 



Wings, Wings, Wings 55 

In numbers, next to the pigeons, came the ducks 
in flocks so vast that the individual members 
seemed as the stars of heaven. The pigeons be- 
longed to a single variety, but the ducks to in- 
numerable varieties — no two of whom seemed 
alike. When the hunting was good in the fall, 
as Adolph put it, — which simply meant the birds 
had come down from the north, — he often took 
the small boy with him to help retrieve the game ; 
and that meant to help pick up a boat load. At 
such times he would devote some attention to 
the small boy's education, when they unloaded 
and sorted the duck, by telling him the names 
of the different kinds. The small boy long cher- 
ished in his memory some of the names, though 
at the time he half suspected that the resourceful 
little Frenchman depended for them more upon 
his imagination than upon his memory; "Ze 
Melard, ze blue and green-winged tel, ze butter 
bel, ze wisle wing, ze wood, ze canvas cover, ze 
pin tail, ze old squaw." The last two names 
were accepted with great mental reservation and 
were regarded as likely imaginary, — but turned 
out to be correct. Adolph thought he was doing 
a land office business if he got 60 cents a dozen 
for his ducks, often, half of which were Canvas- 
back; and no one dreamed that the time would 
ever come when duck of that variety would sell 
in the New York market for $10.00 each, — a price 



$6 What Birds Have Done With Me 

easily realized to-day. While vast numbers went 
on farther north, multitudes remained and nested 
in every lake, river, creek and little pond, and 
could be seen swimming around later in the sea- 
son in the midst of their broods — almost like do- 
mesticated ducks, with whom they occasionally 
mixed freely. 

Culver, Hamilton, and Spaulding ponds con- 
tained many such families, but in Culver's, the 
smallest of the three and the nearest to the vil- 
lage, all were shot early in the season; leaving 
open water there for three families of Wood- 
duck that later on took possession with their 
pretty broods. It was the small boy's first sum- 
mer in the wilderness and he became much inter- 
ested in these families of wild things, and was on 
a fair way to a friendly acquaintance, when one 
Sunday while at Sunday-school, some Christian 
hunter visited the pond and killed four of the old 
birds and slightly wounded a fifth — a male that 
later on died; this left one mother bird and seven 
ducklings. The wild mother in spite of her good 
reasons to distrust man, soon overcame her fear 
of the little tad who came, literally, casting his 
bread upon the water. How the bright-eyed, in- 
credibly swift-motioned little fellows would 
scramble for it; and they knew who brought it 
better than the small boy's sister, who had so 



Wings, Wings, Wings $1 

much to say about his appetite for bread and 
butter meals. 

A perfect gentleman, whose name was Darling 
and who had a business named after him in a 
nearby town, came over to sell Culver a patent- 
right, — and got the wild mother and four of her 
babies who could not fly — and a mink mercifully 
prevented the remainder from starving to death. 
For a few days after this, had the teacher hap- 
pened to glance at the small boy's slate, she would 
have seen the word Darling and might have con- 
cluded that she had surprised a first love affair; 
but she would have been miles from the truth, for 
that represented to him no term of endearment, 
but an active little flame of pretty-fierce hatred. 
The capital "D" was the one significant letter 
and it stood for a certain lean, hungry gentleman 
whose full costume comprised hoofs, horns and a 
tail. 

The small boy knew something that few nature 
lovers of the day seem to know: namely, that in 
the bird kingdom, the duck is the natural and 
irresistible harlequin. Imagine a quiet sheet of 
water, on a peaceful October late afternoon, cov- 
ered with countless thousands of ducks — before 
they had become the gun-shy creatures of to-day 
— and it requires no further imagination to see 
before you a Water Circus, the like of which you 



58 What Birds Have Done With Me 

never saw on earth: unless your memory carries 
you back to the early days in the wilderness when 
it still belonged to wild things. Our base-ball, 
foot-ball, and College field-day become tame af- 
fairs in comparison to the duck high carnival. 
Of course, he couldn't see it all quite clearly on 
account of the flying spray that they scattered to 
the four points of the compass, but the small boy 
never doubted that they were playing "I spy," 
"sheep in the pen," "anty over," and "pullaway" ; 
and the wild screaming joy in the eternal joy of 
life was never exceeded since the stars sang to- 
gether at the dawn of Creation. Where all this 
occurred, there is neither sight nor sound of liv- 
ing thing to-day. The waters are in uneasy mo- 
tion, muttering incoherent complaints to the 
water flags that line the shore, and whispering in 
lonely places, the forgotten histories of all life's 
yesterdays. 

Wings, wings, wings, there are yet wings in 
the upper air and the dimming eyes of age watch 
them from the same hill-top where the eyes of 
youth followed them in the long ago. Canadian 
geese in military precision hurl themselves across 
the sky, at an altitude where no fowler can do 
them harm, obedient to the mysterious call of the 
North. Few and scattered are the flocks com- 
pared to those that used to go by calling to each 
other in that hoarse, honking cry, that falls upon 



Wings, Wings, Wings 59 

the ears of heaviness and sleep, in the mid-night, 
as an "all's well" from the watchers of the silent 
places. Adolph sometimes shot them when they 
stopped to rest or feed, but to the small boy it 
was an evil act, a kind of a treachery to a stranger 
from a far land who should have received hos- 
pitality. How big they were, and what a won- 
derful thing a wing was that could carry such a 
great bird through the sky, as fast as a train of 
cars could run on an iron track. The sky made 
them small, but the earth made them large, and 
until the Frenchman told him of his mistake, he 
had thought them the largest birds in the world. 
Adolph told him that to compare them to a Swan 
was like an old rooster to a big turkey. 

Adolph also told him that swans were harder 
to see than geese, because they were white and 
flew higher and did not keep asking you to come 
and shoot at them — the way a fool goose did. 
The very next day he saw them, not flying in a 
great V-shaped flock as he had expected, but in 
a straight line, hard to tell from the white clouds 
that hovered about them and whose children they 
seemed to be. If they were not really the chil- 
dren of the clouds, maybe the clouds wanted to 
race with them ; but as he watched them sail along 
they seemed too stately to race with anything, 
unless it might be with their own shadows — and 
they were clearly too high up to even see them. 



60 What Birds Have Done With Me 

Of all the things with wings, they seemed the 
most wonderful and farthest removed from the 
common earth to which other creatures belonged, 
and he was greatly shocked when Adolph told 
him that "Ze woman, she use ze down to pretty 
ze dress," Not long after this, at church, he saw 
a very beautiful little girl wearing a blue merino 
cloak, with a hood to match, trimmed with Swan's 
down, and was not shocked, for some way she, 
also, seemed a child of the white clouds. 

The cranes going by — 'way up in the blue ether 
— with their weird cry, were things of the sky 
and not of the earth. They undoubtedly had 
wings but they did not seem to use them, but 
were blown along the great currents of air, — a 
part of them, — riding on their backs, with their 
long legs stuck out behind to steer with, as idle as 
the proverbial painted ship upon the painted 
ocean. In later years, the small boy had to very 
greatly revise his notion with regard to the crane 
as a super-terrestrial creature, and it became not 
only a creature of the earth, but of the low places 
of the earth, the swamps, and marshes and dis- 
mal fens, where slimy things crept and crawled 
and hid in rank grass. Like some other things, 
it became rather grotesque on close inspection, but 
one of Nature's pet jokes all the same. Every 
one, young and old, laughed at the ridiculous long 
legs, and yet concealed in those same stilts, from 



Wings, Wings, Wings 61 

common observers, is a whole legal brief, going 
far to prove the adaptation of means to ends in 
the scheme of things. Those long legs, clearly 
intended for wading, would not be of much value 
if not a step could be taken without a splash; 
so that has been provided for, and the wide- 
spreading toes are carefully folded up by the 
same contraction of the muscles that raise the 
foot, and are not allowed to expand till the foot 
is again beneath the surface of the water, and 
consequently there is no splash. In spite of all 
this, perhaps the frog is about the only thing 
that does not regard the Crane as a joke. 

"They shall mount up on wings, as Eagles," 
said the Prophet of God, foretelling the strength 
to be the inheritance of the Redeemed : and never 
was grander figure of speech used to portray 
super-human might. The power of flight reaches 
its final triumph in the king of the air; other 
winged things hurl themselves through it, while 
the Eagle alone, floats across fields of space 
claiming lazy kinship with the passing cloud. 
Effortless it climbs invisible spiral stairs that lead 
upward toward the very temple of the sun and 
drops back to earth, held in the secure embrace 
of some dreamy zephyr. It soars and seeks those 
far altitudes that no eye hath reached and 
through which dreams wander and lose their way. 
Along the rocky slopes of old Sugar Loaf, the 



62 What Birds Have Done With Me 

small boy heard the young Eagles crying for food 
from a nest that overlooked lake and forest and 
plain, and he watched with never-flagging interest 
the old birds climbing the viewless ladders of the 
sky and he knew, as only those know who have 
never doubted, that when the dying Christian in 
the hymn, cried, "Lend me your wings, I mount, 
I fly," — his soul was calling for the wings of an 
Eagle. 



CHAPTER VI 



PIRATES 



The immigrant of to-day, following the rail- 
road, knows little or nothing of the privations 
suffered by those of fifty years ago, who preceded 
the railroad and in a way were swallowed up by 
the wilderness. Many of the early settlers of 
Wisconsin found themselves not only a hundred 
miles away from a market, but what was almost 
as bad, a hundred miles away from even a weekly 
newspaper, and in some cases destitute of any- 
thing to read. Even professional men carried 
their libraries in saddle-bags and any kind of read- 
ing was prized like a gift of the gods. The New 
York Tribune, the New York Weekly, the New 
York Ledger, came as angelic visitors. As a 
rule, no family took more than one of them and 
they were traded about till they were literally 
read to fragments, and the fragments kept to 
wad a gun. With regard to the two last-named 
it would, doubtless, have been better for the ris- 
ing generation had they been used as gun wads 
before they were read at all, for what they offered 
63 



64 What Birds Have Done With Me 

starving minds were veritable "apples of Sodom." 
They were read by everybody, often read aloud 
so they could be quickly passed on to the next 
eager lot of readers; and their lurid pirate stories 
fixed themselves in the minds of the juvenile list- 
eners to their very great harm. Perhaps some of 
them never forgot them, and at least one small 
boy had good reason to remember the worst of 
them — if there are degrees of iniquity in pirate 
stories — all the days of his life. 

Captain Ludlow, of "The Sure Death," was a 
monster, — capable of such frightful atrocities that 
even the devil would have done himself credit to 
have disowned him as a subject. There was no 
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde about him, though at 
times having the mien of a perfect gentleman, he 
was always consistent, always the fiend incarnate. 
It could never be said of him that he did not care 
a hang for humanity — for his ambition seemed 
to be to hang the whole human family. He had 
a commendable pride in the originality of his 
treatment of captives; he had forced none of 
them to walk the plank — that was old-fashioned 
when he came upon deck — so all that fell into 
his hands had been given their exit from a world 
of trouble through the hangman's noose. 

Of course always excepting himself and his first 
and second mates, Guzzling Jack and Gorging 
Jimmy, English Bone, a gaunt miscreant, was a 



Pirates 6$ 

person of great importance, for he was hang- 
man, and that post was no sinecure on "The Sure 
Death." If one of the great family newspapers, 
alluded to above, is to be relied upon, Captain 
Ludlow, when business was heavy and many cap- 
tives were coming his way, was in the habit of 
taking a day off and holding a general hanging 
bee. On such occasions; the Captain of "The 
Sure Death" would be present in a semi-official 
character, invariably white duck trousers, ruffled 
shirt, and scarlet jacket and cap — so covered with 
gold braid as to look like the field of the cloth 
of gold in miniature. It almost goes without the 
saying that on such occasions, he puffed his cigar, 
in all the bustle, with the bored expression of one 
forced by politeness to listen to a very old story. 
On such occasions, English Bone, the hangman, 
held the center of the stage — an artist in his line, 
— decorating the rigging with assorted bodies, 
heavy-weights below and so on up, with an infant 
at the fore-top gallant mast. It was always quite 
clear that in the mind of the author, English 
Bone had a mighty taking way with him. On 
more than one occasion when his Captain was 
bearing up manfully beneath all his gold lace on 
deck, "The Sure Death" hopelessly becalmed, 
English Bone had strung up one of the crew, just 
to add interest to a sunset at sea. 

As the natural result of this kind of reading, 



66 What Birds Have Done With Me 
the woods adjacent to the settlement were full of 
little pirates. On one summer afternoon, Shanty 
Pete's crew had come ashore from their water- 
logged flat boat, and the crew to amuse their 
Captain, were staging one of English Bone's 
hanging bees. Captain Shanty Pete stood about 
minus the gold braid, but with the cigar and the 
bored look. Stub Miner, with his bandy legs, 
red hair, freckled nose and rabbit mouth that was 
ever agap, in no way looked the part of English 
Bone, the Sure Death's hangman, but was 
hungry for the job — and got it. Perhaps he 
proved his fitness for so much honor in the way 
he cursed his men for their clumsy efforts to erect 
a gallows, according to his rather vague orders. 
Captain Shanty Pete had finally to come to the 
rescue with his profanity as it was getting to be 
a question if his cigar, which had only been what 
is called a snipe at the beginning, would last 
through the execution. Guzzling Jack and Gorg- 
ing Jimmy, i. e., the two little Eaton boys, finally 
saluted and pronounced all things ready. 

Two sticks, with crotches at the top, had been 
driven into the ground and into the crotches was 
placed a horizontal bar and to this were attached 
the nooses — five in number — made of fish line and 
about two feet long. The trap was a slender 
wand of willow placed parallel to the bar above 
and about six inches below it, easily yanked out 



Pirates 67 

of shallow notches in the uprights. An old jacket 
at the foot of a big white oak nearby held the 
prisoners. Stub Miner, burlesquing English 
Bone, though he knew it not, now proceeded to 
place each captive in place and adjust the noose. 
Merciful heavens ! They were five young Golden 
Woodpeckers nearly grown and as innocent and 
helpless as any other babies. They were clearly 
not at all afraid and clung to the fatal drop with 
wonderment in their bright eyes — and one of 
them actually opened its mouth to be fed. Now 
or never — if this slaughter of the innocent was 
not to take place — interference must come from 
some quarter and it so happened that a certain 
small boy, hidden behind a nearby cedar and 
fascinated by the horror of what had been going 
on before his eyes, was selected as the puny agent 
of that mysterious something that we call Provi- 
dence. 

When Shakespeare wrote of mercy as a uni- 
versal quality that "droppeth as the gentle rain 
from heaven upon the place beneath," he should 
have made an exception of that flinty part of a 
pirate's anatomy, generally called a heart; for 
all pirates, especially little ones, know nothing 
of such softening influences. Intuitively, the 
small boy knew full well that any plea for mercy 
would not only be denied but would add zest to 
the gang's orgy of cruelty. Stub Miner, as Eng- 



68 What Birds Have Done With Me 

lish Bone, was on the eve of springing the drop, 
when a kind of a human catapult shot out from 
behind the cedar and the head of it took him 
exactly in the pit of the stomach, and for a little 
time, in the beautiful and expressive language of 
Bret Hart — "the subject of proceedings inter- 
ested him no more." Captain Shanty Pete was 
that spellbound that he "got his" before he could 
speak or move and went down beside the redoubt- 
able English Bone — equally limp and equally 
drowsy. The little Eatons in retreat, the small 
boy was in possession of the field barely long 
enough to release the captives, who were too 
young to either walk or fly, when the "little 
Eatons" made a grand rally and he went down 
before their charge with both on top — and 
Shanty Pete, capping the climax, atop of the 
struggling trio. It's no use, at this late day, to 
recount all the pirates did to their helpless pris- 
oner; sufficient to say that after he was securely 
bound with fish-line, Stub Miller walked over him 
and kicked him in the face — fortunately with bare 
feet. 

The pirates now reorganized their hanging 
bee, first sending to the boat for a rope for the 
land-lubber who had dared to interfere with their 
sport; they would dispatch the bird-captives first, 
and then hang their would-be rescuer from the 
white-oak, close beside them, as a horrible exam- 



Pirates 69 

pie of the fate of all who attempted to interfere 
with their royal sport. Putting the small boy 
where he would have to witness the execution, 
they proceeded to once more arrange the young 
Woodpeckers on the drop, this time successfully 
pulled from beneath them. They swung by their 
necks, but it was found that their weight was not 
sufficient to even strangle them to death, — much 
less break their necks. Captain Shanty Pete was 
equal to the occasion; the "little Eatons" were 
ordered to get five stones, each bigger than the 
body of the captive to whose feet one was to be 
attached, then the hanging might proceed — after 
the fine model set by the great Captain Ludlow. 
If the small boy was really afraid of being hung, 
he could never afterward tell for certain, for 
like the "Tar Baby," he was saying nothing, but 
was alert and watchful as no "Tar Baby" ever 
was. Possibly it was on account of being so 
much closer to the earth than the rest that he was 
the first to hear the approaching footsteps of his 
deliverers. 

Ben Burroughs and Ira Smith, two youths ap- 
proaching what Lowell calls "the awful verge of 
manhood," strolling along the lake, by the merest 
accident, flanked the pirates and captured their 
captain and hangman, before those worthies 
knew their danger. Shanty Peter fairly roared 
for mercy and prayed for clear weather beneath 



70 What Birds Have Done With Me 

3. rain of cuffs from the strong hands of Long 
Ben, as he was called. He did not have to be 
told a second time to cut the bands that made 
the small boy a prisoner and being on his knees, 
he thought without suggestion, of the apology, 
of which he made the small boy the recipient; 
pronouncing it with something of the unction of 
a divinity student, practicing the "have mercy 
upon us, most miserable sinners." English Bone, 
in the equally strong hands of his captor was also 
treading the thorny path of repentance and resti- 
tution. Mid a storm of "pitchforks and coals of 
fire," he released his captives — seemingly unhurt 
— and made five ascents of the white-oak, whence 
they had been taken, to restore each one to its 
home in the heart of the oak, — secure from all 
enemies except young pirates. The "little 
Eatons" made good their escape so it was only 
to Pete and Stub that the final riot act was read, 
mild yanks and cuffs emphasizing important parts. 
They readily promised never to play pirates 
again, never to molest another bird's-nest, and 
to do their utmost to break up all other piratical 
gangs infesting the beautiful lake and the noble 
forest, already set aside as the site of an institu- 
tion of learning. They were then asked sepa- 
rately and collectively, if they regarded them- 
selves as soundly converted and answering in the 
affirmative, their captors led them out to the 



Pirates 7 1 

end of the pier — which was a tree fallen into the 
water — to which their boat was hitched, and 
knowing that they could swim like water-rats, 
they were solemnly assured that in the case of 
reformed pirates, baptism must follow without 
delay, and they were dropped into the lake. Wet 
and shivery and thoroughly humiliated, as they 
pulled their boat for home, it is to be hoped that 
Captain Ludlow, of "The Sure Death," and his 
noble compatriot, English Bone, seemed to them 
what they were in fact, the frightful monsters of 
a frightful dream. 

That anything of lasting importance should 
have had its birth in this scrap among five little 
boys over a brood of young Woodpeckers, on 
the face of it is improbable, and yet the insig- 
nificant affair was not without its life-long influ- 
ence upon the after-life of our small boy. He 
had been the rescuer of five young birds against 
great odds and these rescued birds, in a way, 
sent him forth, with an unflagging determination 
never to give up the struggle, against all pos- 
sible odds, for the rescue of all birds from their 
human enemies, boys and men. 

It was a forlorn little figure, with torn shirt 
and bloody nose, that went limping home amid 
the long shadows of the afternoon, not knowing 
that the pirates and the golden woodpeckers 
together had come very near making a hero out 
of him. 



CHAPTER VII 

AN OLD LOG THAT WAS BEWITCHED 

It is said of the bumblebee that he hums but 
never sings, and it may be said of the Ruffed 
Grouse, with equal truth, that he drums but never 
plays a tune; but his drumming, such as it is, in 
connection with the booming of the Prairie 
Chicken, constitutes an essential part of the great 
spring orchestra. In the forest of my early years, 
the wandering minstrel with a drum was every- 
where and nowhere, silence quickly swallowing 
sound and vacancy places that seemed alive. Not 
only Wordsworth's Cuckoo is to be called "a wan- 
dering voice," but the name applies equally well 
to a vast number that we occasionally hear but 
seldom or never see. In the north woods on my 
father's farm, by a fence in a dense thicket was 
an old log, — a prostrate giant, whose bark had 
crumbled into nothingness and whose heart was 
a cavernous chamber of black emptiness. 

Though it may seem a far cry to suggest a 
comparison between this venerable log and the 
72 



An Old Log that Was Bewitched 73 

statue of Memnon, that was said from time to 
time to give out a sound like the breaking of a 
harp-string, it is nevertheless a fact, much bet- 
ter authenticated than the story of the statue, 
that the log was full of uncanny, mysterious 
sounds that saluted the dawn and at certain sea- 
sons of the year, might be heard almost any time 
throughout the day. They did not sound like 
harp-strings, but were clearly alive with a thrill- 
ing affinity for a boy's heart-strings. Poe opened 
the door of his chamber and in there stepped a 
stately Raven of the saintly days of yore; but a 
thousand times I opened the door of the grove 
and peered in to find silence there, and nothing 
more. Silence, tense and inscrutable, fairly lay- 
ing the somnolent old log upon which a woodland 
minstrel had stood, not two minutes before, mak- 
ing the welkin ring, and speedily eloped with the 
echoes. In those days, of a May morning, you 
might start to run it down and it broke out behind 
you; retrace your steps and you heard it to the 
right or left — clearly making a fool of you in a 
quest as impossible of success as an attempt to 
catch your own shadow. 

It really seemed as though no one in the com- 
munity could explain the mystery of the bewitched 
log, but no one took it seriously and laughed at 
me as a rule, some resorting to Munchausen in- 



74 What Birds Have Done With Me 

vention — common ways of meeting the eager in- 
quiry of a child anxious to learn all about things 
in his new world. 

My parents were city born and bred and knew 
nothing of nature. Clesen Smith, our neighbor 
on the East, told me — through a great cloud of 
tobacco smoke, typical of a hazy state of mind — 
that the sound was made by tree-toads, that doubt- 
less made the old log their home. Grant Culver, 
to the East, was quite positive that the Fairies 
were using the log as a prison, for political of- 
fenders and what I heard was an awful warning 
being given out from time to time by the miserable 
captive. Jerry Norton, the village liar, had three 
possible explanations. A Woodchuck had a den 
under the log and what I heard was the Wood- 
chuck chucking wood: a Prairie bull-snake had 
its den in the log and warned its children by 
pounding its tail on the ground when it was go- 
ing away to spend the day: a Were-wolf lived in 
the log and the explosive sounds I heard were its 
gloating enumerations of the number of human 
creatures it had devoured. 

Truth is said to be at the bottom of a well, 
but the explanation of mystery is often found 
waiting you at the side of the road, at the end of 
a long journey. Only after years of search did 
I find out the true explanation of the bewitched 
log, and witchcraft was changed into love, an even 



An Old Log that Was Bewitched 75 

greater mystery — fed by a million flames and 
fanned by ten million strange processes. Back 
in the primitive sons of life, love was fanned by 
battle, and the female was charmed to give her- 
self to the victor ; but the day dawned when love 
would be fanned by elements quite remote from 
physical force — fancy being captured by means 
too occult to be formulated, or expressed if for- 
mulated; fancy giving way to interest, and inter- 
est giving birth to a god, a goddess, a myth, — 
the one great reality in a world of shadows. 

We do not always find when we seek and we 
often stumble upon the thing for which we had 
long sought in vain. A half-domesticated, half- 
wild heifer, recently purchased by my father, 
escaped from the home pasture and was thought 
to be hiding a new-born calf somewhere in the 
north woods, and on a misty gray Saturday morn- 
ing, I was the new member of a searching party, 
now quite worn out by two unsuccessful days of 
pursuit; trained intellect struggling with blind in- 
stinct. A fool cow and calf's brains making 
monkeys of lords of creation. No wonder every- 
one was out of humor and my proffered assist- 
ance was lightly esteemed. Long before day- 
light, with sundry pieces of venerable toast — for- 
gotten by every one, and never-to-be-forgotten 
by me, — in my pocket, I took to the woods and 
probably would have taken to my heels had I run 



76 What Birds Have Done With Me 

upon the black cow in a thicket and in the dark- 
ness mistaken her for a bear, of which I had heard 
much and seen little. It was fore-ordained from 
all eternity that my way that morning should take 
me in the neighborhood of the bewitched log and 
the approach of bare feet over wet leaves and 
grass must have been as near being shod with 
silence as it is ever possible to human kind, and in 
addition to this I was approaching from the north- 
east, an entirely new direction, and the very first 
glimpse of the log revealed the presence of some- 
thing new — a big bird standing upon it in the atti- 
tude of a soldier on guard. We were both wait- 
ing for something, and unless something outside 
of us intervened, we would have to remain motion- 
less, in statu quo, for twice ten thousand years — 
and all the time silence like a mighty, invisible 
flood was rising higher and higher and threaten- 
ing to drown us. Help! Rescue from the un- 
speakable thing into which we are sinking! We 
had not noticed it before, but all the time sugges- 
tion had been saying in a soothing voice, "sleep, 
sleep, go to sleep." What broke the spell was 
the sun in the east; the military bird broke into a 
wild gyration and emitted a torrent of sound, 
from now on no more mysterious than the break- 
fast bell at home. I showed my approval like 
Tarn O'Shanter, but my witch fled, a brown streak, 
— I in pursuit to get an identifying look in the 



An Old Log that Was Bewitched 77 

open — when not ten rods away I stumbled over 
a black calf that was quickly joined by its mother ; 
and she and I wended our way home, each in pos- 
session of our dark secret. 

There is this singular thing about a mystery; 
when you think it all cleared up, the sun of truth 
is just beginning to break through the clouds of 
error and the full noon is apt to be hours away. 
I had the calf in the barn and the cow in the 
pasture, and had been scolded at by my brothers 
and praised by my father before it dawned upon 
me that I did not begin to know all about the 
crazy Ruffed Grouse yet; whereas I knew who 
made the noise I did not have the ghost of an idea 
as to why he did it. It required weary hours of 
waiting and watching before proof, strong as 
Holy Writ, established his claim to being the most 
poetic of woodland minstrels beneath the window 
of the female of the species — the surrounding 
hills, her castle walls, and his loud lament, a 
woeful ballad to his mistress' eye-brow. 

Let no man say, "Oh, vanity, thy name is 
woman," for man who has the first right to about 
everything has first claim to vanity as well. Mrs. 
Peacock, Mrs. Gobler and Mrs. Ruffed Grouse 
must have a certain amount of contempt for their 
silly husbands, always on dress parade, always 
trying to show off and attract attention. Especially 
is Mr. Ruffed Grouse's attempt to drum up ad- 



78 What Birds Have Done With Me 

mirers little short of disgusting. With him, every 
year is leap year and the drumming is to give 
notice that he is at home and ready to receive 
proposals of marriage from eligible spinsters and 
attractive widows. Love is certainly blind, or no 
self-respecting female would fall in love with this 
Jumping-Jack, with a fog-horn attachment. Per- 
haps they finally marry him to stop his noise, but 
if such is the case the sacrifice is useless, for the 
noisy lover makes a noisy husband, just as a 
drunken lover makes a drunken husband. Much 
has been written and said against vanity, but 
seriously it is something of a question if it may 
not be a virtue masquerading as a vice. Making 
the most of what has been given you by Mother 
Nature isn't so bad, always trying to look your 
best cannot be condemned, and trying to make all 
the world love you suggests the golden rule in 
a party dress. If vanity is the detestable vice 
we have been taught to think it, then it follows as 
the night the day that Mr. Peacock, Mr. Gobbler 
and Mr. Ruffed Grouse will prove to be especially 
bad husbands, but as a matter of fact quite the 
reverse is the real state of the case. Mr. Gobbler, 
so prominent and respected on Thanksgiving oc- 
casions, is a perfect model of conjugal devotion, 
willingly taking upon himself fully one-half of all 
domestic duties and such a perfect under-study 
of his better half that if any calamity happens 



An Old Log that Was Bewitched 79 

to her, domestic matters go along without a skip 
or a break. With regard to Mr. Peacock, I could 
a tale unfold, but that is another story. There 
is a great deal to be heard about the private life 
of Mr. Ruffed Grouse, but one cannot and should 
not believe all they hear and nothing has been 
proven against him that would make it impossible 
to put on his tomb-stone the usual statement that 
he was a good neighbor, a devoted husband, and a 
kind father. 

I am willing to bear testimony as to the good 
character of the vain fellow who had me and the 
old log bewitched. Though our acquaintance 
never could have been termed intimate, I entered 
into the family's joys and sorrows to some extent. 
I was not invited to the wedding, but happened 
along, so to speak, at the christening. A fine 
family, John Roger family, and when the little 
ones most needed a mother — a two or a four- 
legged wolf got her — and the bereaved husband 
became the devoted father, bringing each and all 
up in the way they should go, and never once try- 
ing to drum up admirers, — I even found him shy 
of praise. 

He loves wilderness ways and his home is the 
forest; his little journey in the world is to visit 
the clearing and we love to see him along high- 
ways that we may kill him on sight. Among 
wood-folk we always think of him as an alert 



80 What Birds Have Done With Me 

business fellow and that leads to the fancy that 
he may be a commercial traveler undergoing a 
Ruffed Grouse re-incarnation. 

I remember very distinctly how the forest had 
been adding tinsel to the fading colors of October 
that somber Sunday morning when I rushed out 
into the open, beyond the north edge of the North 
Woods, for some explanation of the barking of 
a dog and the sound of guns in a woods to the 
west, a half a mile away. To many, what was 
taking place would have been as difficult of inter- 
pretation as a forgotten dream, but to me it was 
all horribly distinct, to its last minutiae. The 
Ruffed Grouse, this bird of mystery, whose drum- 
ming has bewitched many a boy, is himself be- 
witched by the barking of a dog under a tree, in 
which he has taken refuge; and a whole flock may 
be shot by gunners in full sight, if they shoot the 
birds on the lower branches first, without a single 
one attempting to escape by flight. Bitterly pro- 
testing, but so far away that I was as helpless as 
a man in a dream, I could do nothing but curse, 
for to me it was a foregone conclusion that these 
fine sportsmen were, as leisurely as they might 
pick apples, killing my Magician and his entire 
family. Dog and followers (at least one of them 
a mongrel), had disappeared before I reached 
the corner of the fence where the murder, most 



An Old Log that Was Bewitched 81 

foul, had taken place. At first I thought nothing 
was to be seen but tramped and bloody grass and 
leaves, but a second examination revealed a bloody 
trail leading into a nearby tangle of berry bushes, 
— which pursued, led to a dead bird and also to 
the certainty that the gunners had left in a hurry, 
for the Commander-in-Chief of the Covey had 
been overlooked. He had been so full of life 
and now how dead he was, how inert — this week 
a watchful father, next week a bit of carrion, 
harmless and even beneficent in the scheme of 
Nature, and killed, really not for food, but for 
sport. Perhaps some old Brahmin rose up in 
me and my very soul was filled with loathing at 
the thought of taking life except as a stern neces- 
sity. I remember thinking so long as he had 
been killed for sport, no one should eat him, so 
I carried him back and hid his body in the hollow 
log where I had seen him first and rolled a heap 
of stones to the door of his fitting sepulcher. 

I took my little grand-daughter last May to see 
the place and found only the stones remaining, — 
more magic, — the old log had turned into a bank 
of violets. While the little child filled her chubby 
hands with Nature's blue dearlings, I said aloud: 
"Nothing walks with aimless feet, not one life 
shall be destroyed or cast as rubbish on the void, 
when God shall make the pile complete." She 



82 What Birds Have Done With Me 

turned and faced me, and said: "What are you 
saying, Grand-daddy?" and in reply I could but 
say: "I don't think I can make you understand, 
Little One, for I don't think I could make any- 
one understand." 



CHAPTER VIII 

NOTHING SO SILLY AS A GOOSE 

It was all in the merry month of May, when 
the south wind is virile, and life everywhere fol- 
lows its fleeting kisses, that the "Cathrine" left 
its pier with a merry little company on board to 
make the tour around one of Wisconsin's many 
beautiful lakes. The steamer was chartered and 
the sole object in view was pleasure, but he who 
goes after pleasure often finds, as did this com- 
pany of merry-makers, that the whole expedition 
was from first to last, a "Wild Goose chase." In 
Pine Bay, on the south side, a Canadian Wild 
Goose was sighted, within the deep shadows of 
that rocky shore, and as they had practically 
ceased to be migrants at so late a date in the year, 
and as they never make their long journey to the 
far north in solitary state, it went without the say- 
ing that the lonely bird was there for the excellent 
reason that it could not fly and such, indeed, 
proved to be the case. Silly Goose that it was, 
it still had power to divide that jocund company; 
the vast majority thirsted for its blood and longed 
83 



84 What Birds Have Done With Me 

for a gun; a respectable minority admired its 
grace and alertness and one man among them all, 
and as it happened the host, determined to cap- 
ture it, mend its broken wing, and in the fall 
migration, allow it, if it so willed, to go south 
among its fellows. 

No trick, you doubtless fancy, for two stalwart 
young men in a boat with a good landing net, 
with a handle six feet long, to pick it up from 
the water. If you have been entertaining such a 
notion of the silliness of a Goose it would have 
been a surprising experience to have been one 
of the company on as astonishing a Wild Goose 
chase as has been pulled off in many a day. After 
an hour of valiant pursuit and most ignominious 
failure, a vote was taken whether to continue the 
trip or the chase; if the first proposition prevailed, 
each one would have to pocket the mortification 
of having been bested by a Goose. So we all 
stood pat and now belong to that respectable 
minority, who going on a "Wild Goose chase" 
return with rejoicing, bringing their bird with 
them. So far the pursuit had been so fast and 
furious that no one had been taxing his gray 
matter to any great extent, but the little voting 
intermission had put us in a judicial frame of 
mind and we shouted our collective wisdom like 
a well-drilled class in the A grade: "She doubles 



Nothing so Silly as a Goose 85 

like a Hare; pursue with the steamer and that 
will give the men in the boat a chance." 

Her undoing was in the discovery of her tactics. 
Like Pat and the Flea, when the men picked her 
up she was not there and reappeared rods away, 
floating to the surface, with neck stretched along 
the surface of the water, looking not unlike drift- 
ing sea-weed. Why had we not noticed that she 
always doubled back? We are only saved from 
dying of mortification by the fact that doughty 
Colonel H., direct from Washington, who took 
full command in the absence of our captain, in 
the rescue party, shouting wise saws and modern 
instances, also failed to notice that "she doubled 
like a Hare." The length of her swim under 
water was limited by the time she could get along 
without breathing, and when she came up beside 
the rowboat, she allowed herself to be gathered 
in without a struggle. I took her from Jim, our 
mighty hunter, and tied her legs with my pocket- 
handkerchief and she lay at my feet upon the 
deck, still without a struggle, biding her time. 

Half the pleasure of hunting is showing off the 
result of the chase to jealous enemies and admir- 
ing friends alike, and on my return to the hotel 
I put my Goose down upon the lawn that every- 
one might have a chance to admire us. Quick as 
a flash, the time she had been biding, arrived, 



86 What Birds Have Done With Me 

and she was using fettered feet and her one sound 
wing in a burst of speed in the direction of the 
lake. That it took so many to capture her, dis- 
abled as she was, came like a secret little revela- 
tion along the line of kinship, which as no one 
mentioned it, rather increased our interest and 
affection for the creature that had such good 
cause to distrust man's tender mercies. 

You'll not be interested in the modern surgery 
upon the compound, comminuted fracture beyond 
the fact that a perfect result was obtained and 
the Goose paid the M. D. his fee, day by day, 
as the case progressed. She received his min- 
istrations without wincing, fighting, or apparent 
gratitude, and in every way proved a beautiful 
patient. After a more or less intimate acquaint- 
ance extending over several months, her physician 
felt as ignorant of much that pertained to her 
as Horace Smith confesses to have felt in the 
presence of the mummy. He knew her race, but 
neither her age nor station, and the question of 
sex proved utterly baffling. The baptismal name 
given was that of Canada, from a notion that 
the captive might owe allegiance to that far 
off Dominion. Once a week its attendant put the 
crockery crate, its prison-house, upon a wheel- 
barrow and took prison and captive to the lake 
for a swim. For the first few times when it 
found itself in its native element it made a des- 



Nothing so Silly as a Goose 87 

perate effort to escape, diving to the bottom and 
beating the water into spray, then it gave it up as 
useless and never afterward repeated its struggle 
for liberty until that coveted possession came 
almost by itself. When it was clearly convales- 
cent, and might have been sent home had it been 
a real patient in a hospital, the fracture having 
knit and all appliances removed, its medical at- 
tendant had a little yard built for it, half of which 
was in the lake and half on the shore, but no top 
was put over the four-foot wire fencing that made 
up the enclosure as it was a question if that was 
necessary in order to keep Canada in the United 
States. If Canada felt any gratitude for the 
treatment it was receiving its monarchial pride 
may have had something to do with the fact that 
it failed to mention it. 

The silence, dignity and utter loneliness of its 
personality was not to be borne and its keeper, 
hearing of a celebrated domestic Goose raised 
by hand, like Pip, in "Great Expectations," and 
christened "Bildad" in his downy youth, lost no 
time in purchasing the same to act as guide, phil- 
osopher and friend of the mysterious Canada. 
Bildad was gorgonized with a stony British stare 
and the Dominion would have none of him. Then 
a Mrs. Goose was selected from Goose masses 
and put between the possible rivals, but Canada 
watched their betrothal with all the dignity that 



88 What Birds Have Done With Me 

stamps the caste of Vere de Vere. They were 
three in a pen but not three of a kind, and though 
Canada did not seem conscious of their existence, 
there is some limit to what can be expected of 
good breeding and it may allowably escape what 
has become unendurable. Canada escaped from 
Bildad and his silly Goose of a wife. Knowing 
the difficulty of holding such opposite elements 
together, I was not greatly surprised and told 
the man to release the other two Geese, but to 
make no attempt to recapture Canada. 

Now came a great surprise, we being thor- 
oughly convinced that Minerva should have had a 
Wild Goose — wild, mind you — instead of an owl 
as emblematical of Wisdom, and having been 
taught to believe that the distance between Cap- 
tivity and Freedom is a million times the length 
of the road between here and Tipperary, I 
found myself nonplused, dumbfounded when con- 
fronted by Canada strolling about the lawn quite 
to the manor born and just as though nothing 
had happened. She finally took up a position 
on the public road, three feet from the wagon 
track and not only rested her plump breast upon 
good old Mother Earth but put her confiding head 
under her wing and pretended to be asleep. Lobo, 
a curious Collie puppy, saw nothing feigned in 
her attitude and attempting a close acquaintance 
found her cruelly wide awake and endowed with 



Nothing so Silly as a Goose 89 

the power of driving all thoughts of slumber from 
his universe. Lobo got his early, I mine later 
when it was borne in upon me that in the mind of 
at least one Goose there was only one man in 
the Universe and I was it. Every day she came 
to the hotel office door for the one man to feed 
her corn, other humans showered her with it but 
they might as well have thrown gravel stones. 
She did not run, she simply walked away, leaving 
every kernel. On moon-light nights, I often en- 
tertained a little audience by calling her in from 
a few rods out in the lake — she never went ten 
rods from home — and throwing corn into the 
water where she would dive for each individual 
kernel. Queer, isn't it, that whereas she could 
scarcely have tasted corn before her capture, she 
should have become so much more fond of it 
than Bildad and his Goose of a wife. It is some- 
times arrogantly asserted that domesticated crea- 
tures have acquired at least a part of their wis- 
dom from contact with man, while quite the 
reverse is true. Bildad was the heir of all the 
ages of domesticated Goosedom; Canada, direct 
from the wild, had forgotten a thousand times 
more than he ever knew. Comparing the two, 
Canada was a gentleman and a scholar; Bildad, 
a loafer and a grown-up gosling. One was an 
astronomer, a World Voyager; the other, a rich 
collection of untried-out Goose oil. How Canada 



90 What Birds Have Done With Me 

had fought for her life, and on the other hand 
you can imagine Bildad going to sleep with his 
head resting across a chopping block. If that 
old story has any foundation in fact, it is my 
belief that it was a Wild Goose that saved Rome. 

It is impossible to go into all her little ways 
through which she captivated my imagination, but 
take her for all in all, she was one of my most 
interesting patients from the wild. Here was 
the omnipresent speculation with regard to her: 
when fall came with countless numbers of her 
migrating kind, would her instinct be too strong 
for her local attachment? Vain speculation; the 
question never was settled. At dawn on the first 
day of "the open season," when our vanishing 
wild life may be slaughtered according to law, a 
drunken young hoodlum, from a neighboring 
town, shot Canada on the beach in front of the 
hotel. It was one of those little occurrences to 
be met with in life, when expression is apt to be 
of a character that would make its publication 
more or less of an indiscretion. 

During all the days of her brief sojourn with 
us, Canada had never uttered a sound and for a 
long time this very fact associated her with all 
silent places. In the spring when we watched 
the flocks going north, when they finally melted 
into space and their last sound became inaudible, 



Nothing so Silly as a Goose 91 

then occasionally the wrath of Canada would float 
along the passing shadow of something that was, 
and is not. 

The Glenn County Club, in California, enter- 
tained two sportsmen? — God save the mark — ■ 
for a day's shooting. They went out where a 
wire fence held captive Canadian Geese, used as 
living decoys. On each side were "rifle-pits" for 
the killers — not hunters — and back of them an- 
other for the "guide," who could imitate the 
"honk" of a Wild Goose. In one hour, with their 
automatic shotguns, they had used up all their 
ammunition and, the account says, had to their 
credit — let us say discredit — two hundred and 
eighteen dead birds. They went back in the 
afternoon and killed enough more to bring the 
number of the slaughtered up to four hundred 
and fifty. This in America, in the name of Sport ; 
we the people who are "the heirs of all the ages 
in the foremost ranks of Time" — still capable of 
a thing like that, and what is even more hideous, 
bragging over it and calling it glorious. No pair 
of crawling reptiles, or fierce, four-footed beasts, 
in the darkest jungle that ever existed in the re- 
motest parts of this earth, have equaled this de- 
struction of harmless creatures, from a mere lust 
to kill. Establish their right to be called "Pot- 
hunters" and you honor them, for comparatively, 



92 What Birds Have Done With Me 

in an ethical point of view, the "Pot-hunter" is a 
Prince and a King, when lined up with the mere 
killer, who does it for fun. 

Let us suppose that yonder, beneath some 
mighty dome, is hung a splendid canvas — Art 
holding Beauty captive — and they together, tell- 
ing the story of heroic deeds. Across the face of 
even such a painting, I do not hesitate to hang a 
picture of Autumn — a word painting from a fa- 
miliar poem — asking you to look at mine, instead 
of the triumph of Art that it but half conceals. 

"A haze on the far horizon, 
The infinite, tender sky, 
The ripe, rich tint of the corn-fields, 
And the wild Geese sailing high, — 
And all over upland and lowland 
The charm of the goldenrod, — 
Some of us call it Autumn, 
And others call it God." 

This is as sweet and tender as the Dawn; here 
we find Hope and Fruition hand in hand — a 
golden fancy mixing the pigments and an infinite 
hand wielding the brush. Autumn is its own 
artist; October, as a painter, shaming the old 
masters by producing only perfection. The pic- 
ture would be incomplete, imperfect were it not 
for the indispensable element of life supplied by 
the flock of birds sailing across the sky. Their 
mystic V is emblematical of splendid victory 



Nothing so Silly as a Goose 93 

over terrestrial conditions, and its lesson to us, 
the Earth-born, is to hope on, hope ever. They 
are the weird musicians of the temple of the sky, 
across the day, beyond the night; we, strangers 
and pilgrims, hear their voices calling, as they fly, 
of the better country far away. 

Oh! ye poor sportsmen of the automatic gun 
and the living decoy, — know ye not that ye are 
robbing God's great picture of life, — His finished 
picture of the finished year? 

On a wild March morning, before dawn, the 
writer of this little sketch seemed to be sinking 
into his last sleep, — the doctors had announced 
that they could do no more, members of the fam- 
ily despairing, and the nurses at their wit's end, — 
when suddenly just over the house came the clamor 
of a passing flock of Wild Geese. The familiar 
sounds roused the one who was so near crossing 
the bar, and turning on his pillow, he cried faintly : 
"Bless you, oh! God bless you!" and at once 
started in to fight his way back to life again. 



CHAPTER IX 

A DISH OF ROBINS 

It has always been rather a matter of regret 
to me that we have to journey along to the middle 
of the alphabet to get the first letter in the name 
Robin. The bird thus designated should have 
been given a name commencing with the first 
letter of the alphabet for the excellent reason that, 
in the order of time, he comes first in our acquaint- 
ance with our bird neighbors, I have never known, 
in the North, a single individual who will not put 
him first in his identification of birds, and even 
in the South, in this respect, I rather think he 
scores over the ubiquitous Mocking Bird. He 
practically is the outer guard to the bird king- 
dom and later on a royal conductor into the 
inner shrine, for a person who does not know a 
Robin, does not know a thing of any bird, and 
the person who knows a Robin well, as a rule 
knows a whole lot about a lot of other birds. 
This will not seem strange when we call to mind 
the fact that Cock Robin is not only a splendid 
teacher of chart classes, but gets himself talked 

94 



A Dish of Robins 95 

about to nearly all the little people before they 
are out of their long dresses and they know about 
his need of stockings and shoes before they have 
any of their own, and romance is born when some 
inspired person, with his woeful history of Cock 
Robin and Jenny Wren at his command, leads 
uncertain little footsteps through the thrilling 
days of courtship, merciless disaster and death 
and sad obsequies through which the Dove can 
actually be heard mourning for some one else's 
love. 

"John O' Mountains" found a dandelion and a 
Robin very much at home on a glacier in Alaska, 
and Cock Robin is a dandelion among birds, will- 
ing to make himself at home just about every- 
where, if you will please keep him out of your 
pot-pies. From the savannahs and jungles of the 
tropics to beyond the tree-line in the far North, 
he adopts all countries and climes and what he 
whistles at sunset is what he whistled at dawn: 
"My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, 
of thee I sing." Then again he is a very common 
unit of measure, to people generally, most birds 
being either larger or smaller than a Robin. 

From her knowledge of his splendid appetite 
it almost looks as though Mother Goose might 
have entertained him at a church supper or had 
him spend a summer vacation with her. Let me 
see, what was it she said of his ability as a trencher 



g6 What Birds Have Done With Me 

man? "He could eat more victuals than three 
score men, a church and a steeple and all the good 
people and yet his belly wasn't half full." 

Once when I was calling professionally on a 
sick lad, his mother stopped in a half-apologetic 
manner to consult me about a sick bird they had 
in the house — a wild bird picked up on the lawn 
two days before. After the manner of doctors, 
I declined to give a diagnosis till I had an oppor- 
tunity to examine my prospective patient; but 
when I saw her coming with a Robin in her hand, 
I knew at once that what ailed this patient was 
just the opposite to what ailed her gorged little 
boy, the bird was starving. Evidently, the good 
lady's education had not included Mother Goose 
or she would not have entertained the notion that 
on a diet of two horse-flies and one angle-worm, 
in two days, the case was likely one of indigestion. 
Again after the manner of my calling, I said: 
"This is a fatal case, you should have called me 
earlier, very sad, very sad, for in a land of plenty, 
it is simple starvation. A hundred horse-flies one 
day and a hundred angle-worms the next, might 
have carried him along until he was old enough 
to go to church alone and look after himself." As 
a matter of fact, a growing young Robin requires 
more than its own weight of food daily. You 
who live across the street or in the next house 
to a girl who practices on the piano five hours 



A Dish of Robins 97 

a day, may thank your lucky stars that kind 
Mother Nature did not crucify you with a sense 
of hearing exaggerated into an acuteness that en- 
ables him to locate the movement of a worm under 
ground two yards away. It seems unconditional 
surrender upon the part of the worm when Mr. 
Robin comes calling, but he gives up the ghost 
to the fisherman only after a struggle, and what 
is worse, often in a niggardly half-a-loaf fashion. 
W. H. Hudson, the famous English naturalist, 
has a book whose title is "Birds and Man," as 
though they were inseparable, but as a matter of 
fact there is only one bird inseparably associated 
with man, and that is the Robin. He can't get 
too close, and if given the slightest chance does 
courting, builds his nest, and rears his family by 
preference under the veranda where human crea- 
tures pass at all hours of the day, and cats prowl 
at all hours of the night. In Mr. Hudson's book, 
to which I have just referred, he tells the story 
of an Owl, reared in captivity and without fear of 
man. So confiding was it, that coming, like all 
Owls on noiseless wing, it would light on the 
shoulder of any human creature who might hap- 
pen along in the night. Some one, supposing 
himself attacked, struck it to the ground and 
broke its wing with a club. It survived its injury, 
but its confidence in man was at an end and it 
grew wilder and wilder until it finally returned to 



98 What Birds Have Done With Me 

its native forest, as wild or wilder than any of 
its kind. 

The Apostle Paul's narration of having been 
scourged, beaten with rods, and made to fight 
with beasts at Ephesus, tragic history though it 
be, still does not give him a place among martyrs 
to be compared to the high perch that the demure 
and cheerful Robin-Redbreast, that you see on 
your lawn, of a summer morning, has earned for 
himself. In very fact, he dies daily as the re- 
sult of ignorant persecution, — Hunnish, ruthless 
slaughter. 

With the single exception of the remediless 
slaughter of the Passenger Pigeon, no other fam- 
ily of birds has suffered what the Robin has and 
still survives. He is, always excepting the Chick- 
adee, the optimist of the bird kingdom, jolly under 
the buffeting of March winds and rollicking 
through adverse conditions that would justify the 
grouch of grouches. For unknown ages half the 
Robin's life has been spent in that part of this 
country, known since its settlement as the South- 
ern States and, since the coming of the white man, 
the birds' Inferno — a St. Bartholomew of birds 
generally speaking, but a veritable slaughter-house 
for this winter resident in particular. 

It is with shame and humiliation that I append 
the following indictment against my brother man, 
and the president of the Grand Jury is no less a 



A Dish of Robins 99 

person than T. Gilbert Pearson, Secretary of the 
National Association of Audubon Societies : 

"Robins in winter sometimes congregate by 
thousands to roost at a favorite spot, and here 
the hunters often come to take them, in the man- 
ner, Audubon tells us, people took the Wild Pig- 
eons during the last century. Stories of their 
killing creep into the public press, and over their 
coffee men marvel at the slaughter of birds that 
goes on, sometimes in their immediate neighbor- 
hood. Here is an authentic account of the raid- 
ing of one such roost, given the writer by Dr. 
P. P. Claxton, of the University of Tennessee. 
He was familiar with many of the details, and 
will vouch for the truthfulness of the facts here 
set forth. He says : 'The roost to which I refer 
was situated in what is locally known as a "cedar 
glade," near Fosterville, Bedford County, Ten- 
nessee. This is a great cedar country, and Rob- 
ins used to come in immense numbers during the 
winter months, to feed on the berries. By the 
middle of a winter's afternoon, the birds would 
begin coming by our house in enormous flocks 
which would follow one another like great waves 
moving on in the direction of the roost. They 
would continue to pass until night. We lived fif- 
teen miles from the roost, and it was a matter 
of common observation that the birds came in 
this manner from all quarters. 



ioo What Birds Have Done With Me 

11 'The spot which the roost occupied was not 
unlike numerous others that might have been 
selected. The trees grew to a height of from 
five to thirty feet, and for a mile square were 
literally loaded at night with Robins. Hunting 
them while they roosted was a favorite sport. A 
man would climb a cedar tree with a torch, while 
his companions with poles and clubs would dis- 
turb the sleeping hundreds on the adjacent trees. 
Blinded by the light, the suddenly awakened birds 
flew to the torch bearer, who, as he seized each 
bird, would quickly pull off its head, and drop it 
into a sack suspended from his shoulder. 

11 'The capture of three or four hundred birds 
was an ordinary night's work. Men and boys 
would come in wagons from all the adjoining 
counties and camp near the roost for the purpose 
of killing Robins. Many times, one hundred or 
more hunters with torches and clubs would be at 
work in a single night. For three years this tre- 
mendous slaughter continued in winter, and then 
the survivors deserted the roost.' " 

These are almost the identical methods em- 
ployed in killing untold numbers of Wild Pigeons, 
which is today probably an extinct bird in Amer- 
ica. This is followed by the testimony of William 
Dutcher, the very Commander-in-Chief of all 
constructive methods and conservative bird work 
in America. 



A Dish of Robins 101 

"Wherever the Robin breeds within the con- 
fines of civilization, man is its friend, and a mu- 
tual attachment has grown up that borders on 
sentiment. The man extends his protection and 
the bird rewards by making his home almost 
under the same roof tree, displaying a confidence 
in his human brother that is begotten by lack of 
fear. 

"In the Robin's winter home in the southland, 
all is different, for there no sentiment but that of 
gastronomies is displayed; the bird is simply a 
tender morsel to be made an integral part of a 
stew or a pie. In Central Tennessee are large 
tracts of cedars, the berries of which serve to 
attract myriads of Robins in the winter. One 
small hamlet in this district sends to market an- 
nually enough Robins to return $500, at five cents 
per dozen, equal to 120,000 birds. My inform- 
ant naively says : 'They are easily caught at night 
in the roost in young cedars; we go to the roost 
with a torch and kill them with sticks, others climb 
the trees and catch the Robins as they fly in.' 
One of the officers of the Louisiana Audubon So- 
ciety furnishes the following information regard- 
ing Robin slaughter in his own state: 'They are 
commonly killed for home consumption and for 
marketing, a conservative estimate of the number 
killed annually being from a quarter of a million 
in ordinary years to a million when they are un- 



102 What Birds Have Done With Me 

usually plenty. During the past winter one gun- 
ner killed over 300 Robins in one day, and in one 
village in the state the boys and young men are 
vying with each other for a record in Robin- 
killing, the present high score being 200 birds in 
one day.' Better, by far, sentiment than slaugh- 
ter, as the one preserves and the other destroys 
what is of great value, as will be proven later." 

From these gloomy pictures of greed, and 
blood-lust and depravity, I turn to the annual 
visits of a pair of Robins — possibly escapes from 
the bird shambles in Tennessee — who for five 
years nested in a vegetable dish on a two-by-four, 
in an open passageway, just outside my office door. 
The first little dish was left there by accident 
and found and appropriated by the birds, and 
afterward was put there for their convenience. 
What beautiful confidence and seeming affection 
for man in spite of his vile treatment of them in 
certain localities; building their home, without 
hands, open to human inspection by the door 
where he passed many times a day. Later on, the 
bright-eyed babies adopted each visitor as a foster 
parent and never failed to stretch wide their big, 
wide mouths for supplementary feedings. Ours 
was the only dish of Robins to be spoken of with- 
out loathing and disgust. It was surely the same 
pair that came year after year to an accustomed 
nesting place, for after the fifth year no nest has 



A Dish of Robins 103 

ever been built there, though an empty dish, cov- 
ered by dust, like the little toy soldier, is still 
"waiting the long years through." Till death over- 
took them, they came unto their own, and their 
own received them with hearts full of affection. 
I never see a Robin, cheerful and active as he 
always is, without a feeling that I am confronting 
an object that stands for much that is best in life. 
To me, he is eternal hope, dressed in working 
clothes. The poet Campbell dressed up hope so 
gorgeously that he makes you feel like Moses in 
the presence of the burning bush : 

Eternal HOPE ! when yonder spheres sublime 
Peal'd their first notes to sound the march of 

Time, 
Thy joyous youth began — but not to fade — 
When all the sister planets have decay'd; 
When, wrapt in fire, the realms of ether glow, 
And Heaven's last thunder shakes the world 

below, 
Thou, undismay'd shalt o'er the ruins smile 
And light thy torch at Nature's funeral pile. 

Against these lurid surroundings of eternal hope 
in the last rays of a burning sunset, I have a 
memory picture of a living incarnate eternal hope 
in the cool dawn, after a night of tempest, — and 
this living hope is only a Robin redbreast. A 
tornado, in the blackness of darkness, wrecked a 



104 What Birds Have Done With Me 

house in which was a woman and her little daugh- 
ter, the husband and father, a fresh air tubercular 
case, in a shack outside; all three found them- 
selves together, they knew not how, stunned, 
bruised, despairing. Though not mortally in- 
jured, they and all their friends united in the 
feeling that unmerciful disaster had done its 
worst. It was a case of who has woes like unto 
my woes and individually and collectively, they 
looked the part. 

There came into my mind some words that I 
had learned from a song of doubt that seemed 
a pretty good expression of my own pessimism: 

"There is no good! There is no God 
And faith and hope is a heartless cheat 
Baring the back for the devil's rod 
And scattering thorns for the feet." 

Then I saw the Robin ! His nest had been hurled 
from a tree and the eggs all crushed, but he 
wasn't crushed, — far from it. The very embodi- 
ment of eternal hope, cheerfulness and energy, he 
and his busy wife were getting ready to build a 
new nest in a wood-shed that had outstood the 
storm. 

Your pardon, but I hear a Robin and am going 
out in the sweet sunshine to get the uplift of a 
moment's association before the night cometh, 
with man's closest bird friend. 



CHAPTER X 

MR. CHICKADEE 

It has been said that America comprises Rhode 
Island and the other States of the Union. I 
understand it to mean that little Rhody is not to 
be bunched, but demands especial mention. Now 
be this as it may, something of the kind certainly 
applies to the Chickadee, — to any one who really 
knows him, it is the Chickadee always having espe- 
cial mention, and the rest of the feathered crea- 
tures that make up the bird kingdom. It was 
said many years ago, that to know Madam 
Recamier was equivalent to a polite education, 
and it may be said with even greater truth that 
to know one Chickadee is equivalent to a scien- 
tific knowledge of all the stuffed birds in kingdom 
come. 

As the only interest the majority of people 
have in a bird is its value for food, I want to say 
right here and now, that for that purpose, as a 
neighbor woman, here in the South, said of her 
husband: "He haint worth shooten." Down in 
Dixie Land, where nearly every bird that flies 
105 



106 What Birds Have Done With Me 

finds its way to the table, I never succeeded in 
running down any sufficient proof to convince me 
that any human hyena had ever devoured Chick- 
adees, though such may be the fact. Without the 
excuse of starvation, staring him in the face, the 
libel on God's creatures, who would do a thing 
like that ought to be Anathema Maranatha. 

As Mr. Chickadee never had an enemy, and 
isn't of value for food, it would look as though 
in their relation he never had any valid reason 
to distrust man; but that is far from the truth, 
for he, in common with all other birds, has had 
good reason to fear "the relentless, remorseless 
bird-skin collector." To kill a Chickadee for any 
purpose seems almost next to the murder of an 
infant for the coral on its neck, in fact the Chick- 
adee is the real Peter Pan of the bird kingdom. 
He has never grown up, but from first to last is 
a dear goo-gooing baby; guileless, confiding, care- 
free, with close relations to all our happy yester- 
days and vitally connected with all our longed-for 
to-morrows; the Alpha and Omega of bird life. 

Adolph Buzze had about the right notion with 
regard to the blessed Chickadee. When he was 
building his cabin in the woods, in zero weather, 
they came in great numbers, and I was astonished 
beyond measure to find wild birds so intimate with 
a human creature. He picked out yellow worms 
from between the bark and the log he was hew- 



Mr. Chickadee 107 

ing for the log house, and scattered them at his 
feet and they came in flocks, Adolph calling them 
"Frenchman's wood chicks." Maybe Adolph 
was a poet for this sounds something like it. I 
asked him where they came from. He did not 
answer at first but after awhile, with a far-away 
look on his face, he pointed to the sky and said: 
"When Frenchman build little house in woods, 
Mighty God send blessings by Chicks. See, easy 
'nuff." 

In early life, in common with so many foolish 
people, I took it for granted that something of 
value may be learned about birds in the study of 
stuffed specimens. In nearly the first case was a 
stuffed Chickadee, possibly one of the very 
messengers that had brought a blessing from 
"Mighty God" to the Frenchman's cabin so many 
years ago. It was rather an unfortunate experi- 
ence for me, from that moment to the present 
time I feel about the whole wretched business as 
I imagine a devotee of religion would feel if he 
entered a cathedral, of his own faith, and found 
Cherubs pinned to the walls like butterflies in 
cases. 

Caesar dead and Caesar alive are a million miles 
apart. The Chickadee in his natural environ- 
ment, very much alive, with his little song so full 
and running over with cheer, and the pitiful 
stuffed specimen, named and numbered and sur- 



io8 What Birds Have Done With Me 

rounded with crude decorative attempts is a trav- 
esty of the real thing, who as Robert Browning 
said of the thrush: 

"He sings each song twice over, 
Lest you should think he never could recapture 
The first fine careless rapture." 

The movie man calls his undeveloped films 
"stills," but these dead and dusty things in cases, 
that once were birds, can never be developed into 
something with a vital relation to life, they are 
"stills" forever. To study them is to study death, 
not life; as well study the withered flower, the 
dead and leafless tree, or a moss-grown tomb. 

I am yet to meet any bird-lover who was ready 
to admit that he ever learned anything of birds 
of real value by the study of the stuffed specimens 
in the museum and, of course, pictures of these 
stuffed specimens are equally worthless. I once 
asked a class in high school to name for me a 
photograph of "Bob White" after he had disap- 
peared from Wisconsin, that had been made from 
a stuffed specimen — and someone called it a Tur- 
key Buzzard, without a dissenting voice being 
raised in the class. Indeed, that fine naturalist, 
W. H. Hudson, in his book, "Birds and Man," 
repudiates the notion that anything can be learned 
of birds by the study of the finest collection in 
existence. He says: "These collections help no 



Mr. Chickadee 109 

one, and their effect is confusing and in many- 
ways injurious to the mind, especially to the young. 
A multitude of specimens are brought before the 
sight, each and every one a falsification and degra- 
dation of nature, and the impression left is of an 
assemblage, or mob, of incongruous forms, and 
of a confusion of colors." 

"These dreary remnants of dead things set be- 
fore them as restorations and as semblances of 
life, produce a profoundly depressing effect." 
"The best work of the taxidermist, who has given 
a lifetime to his bastard art, produces in the mind 
only sensations of irritation and disgust." From 
the above extracts from his writings, it is easy 
to get his point of view with regard to the stuffed 
specimen as unnecessary and useless in the study 
of the birds he knew from a close and extended 
personal relation in their natural environment. It 
is scarcely putting it too strongly to say that 
according to his system of theology the collector 
stood for the devil himself. 

The difference between a "Bird Lover" and an 
"Ornithologist" is much the same as between a 
"Demonstrator of Anatomy" and a "Family 
Physician," one gains his facts from death, the 
dissection of a dead body, the other from life, 
the study of a living creature. Follow in the foot- 
steps of the Ornithologist, pure and simple, and 
they will lead you to a shamble, a Valley of 



no What Birds Have Done With Me 

Shadows, where death reigns, making one think 
of what King Herod did to this world when he 
ordered the slaughter of the innocent. Systematic 
Ornithology is scarcely necessary at present, it 
has been done and well done, and back of much 
of the so-called scientific examination of birds' 
stomachs is the commercial demand for a stuffed 
specimen. On the first page of our this week's 
village paper is an article on birds, a scientific 
article, beyond question; an account of the exam- 
ination of the stomachs of some of our rare and 
beautiful birds is given and the statement is made 
that 2ji stomachs were available. 

This certainly suggests a successful drive upon 
the part of the Allies — Scientists, Plume Hunters 
and Curators. We can but adopt the justly cele- 
brated words of Madame Roland and cry out: 
"O! Blind and deaf and bloody Ornithology, — 
'what crimes have been committed in thy name.' " 

You can learn something about birds in a mu- 
seum that happens to have a collection of stuffed 
specimens, and most museums have, and you can 
learn something of the piano, under a good 
teacher, if you never have anything but a dumb 
instrument to practice upon, but in both cases the 
element of life is wanting and discord will be the 
inevitable result of misdirected study. 

In all his long years of study in the Philippines, 
I notice that Dean Worcester failed to secure the 



Mr. Chickadee in 

skin or stuffed specimen of a single native and 
no one scoffed at his failure to do so ; but had he 
been an Ornithologist studying birds, such actions 
would have discredited his work for all time. 
Now as a matter of fact we "Bird Lovers" care 
mighty little about the inside of a bird, and what 
we want to learn most of all is how to protect 
them from their enemies and their so-called 
friends, who simply regard them as being worth 
skinning. 

Scorning to make the slightest concession to the 
man "whose god is his belly," in passing, perhaps 
it will be as well to make a little concession to 
the man whose god is a little row of figures show- 
ing the net earnings, for three hundred and sixty- 
five days, of the farm in which every other inter- 
est is merged, and assure him that his Chickadees 
brought him in more than his chickens. I do not 
care whether you believe it or not, but all growing 
things are menaced by a mighty and ever-increas- 
ing army of insects, and this tiny Chickadee 
is a dough-boy attacking the enemy in his trenches 
and destroying as many as five or ten thousand on 
a single drive. This country has National For- 
ests and the Chickadee is our best National For- 
ester. Nevertheless I am loath to discuss his 
economic value, for to me it seems a bit like ask- 
ing the economic value of the benediction that 
follows after the prayer. We cannot put an esti- 



112 What Birds Have Done With Me 

mate on spirituality and the Chickadee is a spirit 
and must be worshiped in spirit and in truth. 

If men realized their condition of pur-blind- 
ness, they would have to say, with the one of old 
whose sight was being restored, "I see men as 
trees walking," for it's only the exceptional per- 
son who really sees things just as they are; for 
only a few things carry any impression to the 
brain, and where that actually takes place, it is 
soon effaced. A certain man went from New 
York to Boston and when his friends asked him 
what he saw, he replied in a perplexed manner: 
"Oh! nothing much; all I remember is two hay- 
stacks I saw out the car window, but they were 
going in an opposite direction." A brilliant man 
who graduated from Harvard at nineteen went 
for a familiar walk along a much-travelled road 
one Sunday morning, taking with him his two 
boys, aged six and eight, and a seven-year-old 
daughter of his host. On his return he said to 
the little girl's father: "Your daughter made me 
feel like a fool this morning. As you know, I 
have taken this walk two or three times a day for 
the last two weeks and during all that time I can 
recall seeing only two birds, a Robin and some 
kind of a wader, so when your little daughter 
pointed out a half a dozen and knew all about 
them, too, it made me feel like no end of a fool." 
An unusually fine, big-hearted, intelligent man, 



Mr. Chickadee 113 

but alas, the "trees he saw walking" had no leaves 
on them. 

A few years ago, with the help of this same 
little girl, now grown to womanhood, we devoted 
some winter days, — we each had our separate 
window, — to watching the Chickadees that came 
to the free lunch counter that we maintained out- 
side on the veranda. By no stretch of the imagi- 
nation could we have called our work either Salva- 
tion Army or Red Cross, for our visiting dough- 
boys always brought their cheer with them. They 
all wore the same uniform but no two looked alike, 
and by the third day all had gone through with 
their baptismal service and in the name of the 
Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, had been 
given Christian names. Please do not think that 
I am going to give the whole list of names, for 
such is not my intention, except in the case of 
certain individuals to whom you are given a spe- 
cial introduction. It went a long way in the 
direction of confidential relations when we could 
call each by his first name and with them as with 
people, nicknames stood for chumminess. "Othel- 
lo" was certainly blacker than the average, but 
to be perfectly honest, failed a little in jealousy 
toward his wife, "White Girl," and tragedy was 
unknown in a conventional marriage in which 
they lived happily ever afterward. Neither could 
we keep it up, and later on they became "Blackie" 



114 What Birds Have Done With Me 

and "Whitey," the rather common members of a 
rather uncommon community. Of course she 
knew that her husband had done his country some 
service and that was all there was about it. 
"Romeo" and "Juliet" were very much in evi- 
dence, and while they had cut out the balcony 
scene altogether, they gave us many a veranda 
scene, which is the next thing, and even at this 
late day I feel it perfectly right to tell the truth 
(and I have a witness who will also swear to it) 
throughout the entire veranda scene, they were 
always eating peanuts. He was some lover but 
with a trifle too much assurance, and while we 
never did, we were always fearful of hearing the 
word universal used in connection with his ability 
to do a single balcony scene. Anyway, it's the 
good husband that counts in the journey of the 
years rather than the great lover. In a quiet and 
harmless way there were reasons for suspecting 
"Juliet" of being a bit flirtatious, which may have 
given "Romeo" cause for being too ready to 
crowd his attentions upon strangers on short no- 
tice. However this may be, before the first sea- 
son was over, matrons were calling him Mr. Im- 
pudence and the name stuck, without any baptis- 
mal service. 

It is a fact, though I question if well known, 
that a raw peanut shelled and sliced across, is to 
a winter bird what candy is to a child. In a 



Mr. Chickadee 115 

shallow cigar box, tacked on the window sill, was 
kept a supply of fine-cut suet, hemp seed, and 
sliced peanut; a well-balanced ration, but not bal- 
anced for long as the peanut would disappear like 
snow in summer, leaving only the hemp seed and 
the suet. All accepted the inevitable with a fair 
amount of Christian patience and resignation, 
with the exception of Mr. Impudence, who never 
failed to be outraged and ready to voice his 
wrongs to the world at large, and to the head 
waiter, grinning at him out of the window, in 
particular. I am not going to admit that he 
actually swore at me, but the way he would droop 
his wings and hurl expletives at me that were 
neither necessary nor ornamental, made me feel 
just as if I had been sworn at. When I supplied 
his needs, he blessed me with the unction of a 
bishop offering forgiveness to a penitent sinner. 
Indeed, he knew who it was that put the food in 
the box and when having made an exhibition of 
himself, if I had not compared him to a bishop, 
I would tell you that he would actually do penance 
himself by taking a hemp seed and flying to a 
nearby tree, hold the seed against a limb with his 
middle toe, pick out the heart, and devour the 
kernel as though it had become to him a means of 
grace. My daughter had a Chick that she called 
"Mother Mary," of so devout a look and gracious 
a mien that she insisted that the old masters had 



n6 What Birds Have Done With Me 

painted the expression a thousand times. Well! 
perhaps. Cheerful and fearless, what can be 
more exalted? What a joyous company, a little 
lower than the angels, but super-human just the 
same! All agree that there is a great gulf be- 
tween man and the "animal kingdom," but the 
Chickadee bridges it in a single, uninterrupted 
journey, when he comes flying from nowhere to 
light upon your hand. Victor Hugo once said: 
"No man who has ever really laughed can ever 
afterward be bad." Be this as it may, I am 
thoroughly convinced that after a wild bird has 
crossed the gulf and voluntarily submitted itself 
to your loving kindness, it thereby swings open 
the door to its own kingdom and makes of you a 
loyal ally, for from that time on you are a man 
who has dreamed dreams and seen visions. 

In mid-afternoon of a gray winter day, return- 
ing from a cold and difficult drive over, or 
through, mighty drifts, my wife met me at the 
door and asked if I would not feed the birds at 
once for a party from a nearby town who had 
brought two little girls to see the birds eat out 
of my hand and had been waiting for some time 
in spite of drifting roads. I immediately at- 
tempted to comply and for a bad ten minutes cer- 
tainly felt like a large-sized "Nature Faker," for 
the little flock of Chickadees that came at my 
call would not come near the tempting sliced pea- 



Mr. Chickadee 117 

nut that I held in my open hand. They came into 
the railing of the veranda just over my head, and 
Mr. Impudence bombed me with expletives and 
they all "dee de de deed" me at a great rate, but 
eat out of my hand they would not. I finally 
"got it through my hair" that they had a not un- 
natural instinct against a fur-bearing animal, and 
I had kept on my Coonskin coat. I dropped it 
off, and presto, I was no Nature Faker at all, but 
a lunch counter where no meal ticket was required. 

The next winter my daughter, after an illness, 
spent some hours a day in a wheel-chair on this 
same veranda and the Chickadees overcame their 
fear of her fur coat and simply walked all over 
her; often taking peanuts from her hand and fly- 
ing up to her hat, which they used as a table. I 
would have you know that the Chickadee has 
very pretty table manners, — in violent contrast, 
for instance, to the Nut-hatch, whose table man- 
ners are atrocious. 

We long since ceased to cultivate too great an 
intimacy with our bird friends, being convinced 
that it is a doubtful kindness to rob them of their 
instinct of self-preservation, and above all else 
teach them not to be shy of man. Over on an- 
other street, fully a mile away, a Chick attempted 
to investigate the bowl of a pipe that an old 
German had in his mouth but was not smoking, — 
possibly looking for a place to hole up in the cold 



n8 What Birds Have Done With Me 

weather, — and the man thinking himself attacked, 
struck the friendly little creature to the ground 
and killed him. It was certainly a warning to us, 
for we had failed to teach our birds not to at- 
tempt even the average pipe without a gas-mask. 
In this little study of the Chickadee it has been 
hard to stick to prose, which is my only reason for 
lapsing into rhyme. 

When the blizzard from the Northland 
Holds the world in fierce embrace 
And ten million swirling crystals 
Sting you, blind you, smite your face ; 
And your world is not your world, 
Grotesque distortions, bush and tree; 
Above the raging, howling tempest 
Comes a joyous chick-a-dee. 
In the soul there's something hidden, 
That such a message comes to greet; 
Above the rage of human passion 
Comes a whisper strangely sweet; 
A little song from out the tempest, 
Born of hope for you and me, 
There's love eternal in the storm cloud 
When this bird sings chick-a-dee. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE SONG AND THE SINGER 

Gene Stratton-Porter's "Song of the Cardinal" 
is a kind of a winged epic and at the same time a 
passionate protest against the man with a gun. 
The man with a gun is consciously attempting to 
kill a singer, but is quite unconscious of the fact 
that if he succeeds he will also have eliminated a 
song from the waning chorus of the summer time. 

This sad old world is in crying need of more 
songs, but each year the number of singers grows 
less and the volume of song fainter and fainter 
and in places it has been swallowed up by all per- 
vading silence. Song is something vast and great, 
at large in nature, waiting for the voice that can 
give it utterance and none can say that it was not 
born close to that realm where angels have their 
birth. Whether the utterance comes to us through 
the medium of a bird or a human singer, the 
uplift is identical and always in the direction of 
the better things in life. 

On Howard Avenue, Biloxi, Miss., a few years 
ago there was a fruit-stand, managed by an old 
119 



120 What Birds Have Done With Me 

Italian woman and she had in captivity a wonder- 
fully beautiful Cardinal, the one bird that carries 
the colors of the University of Wisconsin through 
all the Southland, and this splendid fellow had not 
only been robbed of his birth-right of freedom, 
but his eyes had been put out with a red-hot iron 
that he might not be able to tell night from day 
and would thus forever keep on calling for a dawn 
whose approach he would never again behold. 
Fight down your indignation and honest rage 
against the perpetrator of the hideous outrage, 
as I did mine, and get down on your knees and 
thank Heaven that neither captivity nor blindness, 
nor both together, can silence a singer that is a 
member of God's orchestra. 

When life is in its fresh, glowing, splendid 
morning, youth with its ardors and unvoiced long- 
ings demands the new songs, but when experience 
has steadied, possibly saddened, the heart de- 
mands the heavenly manna of the old songs. 
It's not so long ago that the realization came that 
there are no new songs ; that a song, like a prov- 
erb, to be truly great must have the approval of 
unnumbered people through a long period of time. 
Every time a national song is sung it becomes 
greater, there adheres to it something of the sen- 
timent, the emotions of the singer, so the solo 
becomes equivalent to the mighty chorus. Call 
this fancy if you please, but I never alone listen 



The Song and the Singer 121 

to a solitary bird song, — I am one of a vast audi- 
ence, and the singer is one of a vast choir invisible. 
Be this as it may, surely the quality of bird song 
is so fine it appeals to the finer sentiments of 
our dual natures like a voice from the vanished 
years. We are all human, and when we hear 
Joseph Addison approving of the music of some 
of our bird friends, the approval is some way 
divided between the bird and ourselves; the bird 
as a good singer and we as good listeners. I here- 
with give an Addison letter that you may see 
what he thought of the song and the singer. This 
letter, written in the year 1708, by Joseph Addi- 
son, to the young Earl of Warwick, whose mother 
he afterward married, is full of a charm that 
time has not dimmed. It reads as follows : 
"My dearest Lord: 

"I can't forbear being troublesome to your 
Lordship while I am in your neighborhood. The 
business of this is to invite you to a concert of 
music which I have found in a neighboring wood. 
It begins precisely at six in the evening and con- 
sists of a Blackbird, a Thrush, a Robin, and a 
Bullfinch. There is a Lark that, by way of over- 
ture, sings and mounts till she is almost out of 
hearing, and afterward falls down leisurely and 
drops to the ground as soon as she has ended 
her song. The whole is concluded by a Night- 
ingale that has a much better voice than Mrs. 



122 What Birds Have Done With Me 

Tufts and something of Italian manner in its 
diversions. If your Lordship will honor me with 
your company, I will promise to entertain you 
with much better music and more agreeable scenes 
than you have met with at the Opera." 

Addison's appreciation of old friends of ours 
carries back into the past, a point of view that 
divorces a real singer from an anatomical speci- 
men. It's a rill near the head-waters of that 
great river, that disregarding mere drift wood, is 
now rather generally recognized as one of the 
living forces of the world-creation's poetry, crea- 
tion's choral singers. 

Joseph Addison, recognized as a thinker of un- 
usual power, of necessity, could not neglect the 
wonderful house of life in which he lived and had 
his being, and consequently investigated bird 
life and had his soul thrilled with bird music; 
music way beyond man's imitation of something 
to be heard where dawn winds laugh and the trees 
of the field clap their hands. It was an old song 
that the Blackbird was singing in those days, but 
what Addison heard was inferior to what Frances 
Ledwidge heard and makes us hear. Listen: 

"And then three syllables of melody 
Dropped from a Blackbird's lute and died apart 
Far in the dewy dark. No more but three, 
Yet sweeter music never touched a heart 
'Neath the blue domes of London." 



The Song and the Singer 123 

This humble Irish poet, this inspired Nature 
lover, this sweetest singer among sweet singers, 
shortly before making the supreme sacrifice for 
his country, put this echo of himself and the song 
of a bird into the heart of humanity. 

Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, "when in 
the thick of it," saw Flanders' fields with the eyes 
of a seer and sweeps the heart-strings of humanity 
with a "Swan-song," the like of which was never 
written, calling upon the world's heroes for help, 
not for himself, but for his cause, — that he might 
sleep where Poppies blow in Flanders' fields. In 
the little poem of fifteen lines, two and a half 
are devoted to a great song that is being sung 
to terrific accompaniments : 

"And in the sky 
The larks, still bravely singing, fly 
Scarce heard amid the guns below." 

What he hears is no madrigal, a mere expression 
of sylvan bowers and love and gaily flitting hours, 
it of necessity must have been a heroic battle- 
song, like the great ones "whose footsteps echo 
through the corridors of Time." 

In the sky of the soldier's mind, in his better 
moments, there often came the shadow of pass- 
ing wings and his soul at such a time was often 
enthralled by some dominant bird song — the phan- 
tom of a silent song for which he listened though 



124 What Birds Have Done With Me 

he knew he could not hear it. He put it into 
his marching songs and it shortened weary miles 
— a spiritual urge, a voiceless benediction from 
vividly remembered yesterdays: 

"There's a long, long trail a-winding, 
Into the land of my dreams, 
Where the Nightingales are singing, 
And a white moon beams." 

Not only to marching men, but to the world 
weary, the lonesome, the man away from home, 
has the singing of wild birds come with an inspira- 
tion and an ever-present help in time of need. 
This story seems to confirm a general belief. A 
man whom unmerciful disaster followed fast, 
found himself so beset with difficulties that he 
made up his mind to go throw himself in a river 
from a bridge; when he got there, he found a 
bunch of boys in swimming at the very place where 
he was going to end it all. Without the least 
modification of his resolve, he hid himself in some 
bushes and settled down to wait their departure. 
Suddenly a brown bird, a Brown Thrasher, in a 
tree almost over his head began to sing, and the 
song gripped the soul of him, snatched him out of 
hell, as he lay there grovelling with his mouth 
in the dust. City bred, he had never listened to 
a bird song — had the utmost contempt for those 
who did — and now when he could not help him- 



The Song and the Singer 125 

self, wonderful waves of melody had taken him 
captive, had lifted him up in an indescribably 
tender embrace and made a new creature of him. 
It was no common bird song, it was a pean of 
victory over the redemption of the most miserable 
wretch beneath the blue sky. Almost before he 
knew it, he was crying over the vanquished cur 
who had come down to the river to end all and 
the next instant, he was laughing and rejoicing 
with the man who was going back to town to win 
his own place in a world that was not all discord. 
Both beauty and melody are divinely ordained to 
bring about the salvation of the lost and they 
frequently unite in the wild bird and the super- 
human song. 

In the general narration of what birds have 
done for me, I recall a case when a wandering 
voice came to me with inexpressible cheer and 
comfort, — shepherding, so to speak, a lost sheep 
— at what age does a human creature cease to be a 
lamb and become a sheep, — is it seven? Lured 
by a cow-bell on the neck of a frisky creature that 
possibly was in training to jump over the moon, 
I had wandered from six to nine o'clock, and 
finally lost my way, in a forest where fences were 
unknown and cattle ranged for miles. I was soon 
to recall snatches of conversation that neighbors 
had carried on with my father. We children 
were not allowed to hear much of the talk, always 



126 What Birds Have Done With Me 

being sent out of the room. Old Clesen Smith had 
figured it out, if "it" kept coming at its present 
rate of speed, "it" would hit the earth in just 
three days. Grant Culver was sure that if "it" 
did not change its course it wouldn't touch his 
house but might tick his barn, ten rods to the east, 
and that was fully covered by insurance. Old 
George Walker said that if the Bible was true, 
there would be signs to give up our leases — he 
said this with a sly chuckle — that the world was 
so given over to wickedness that nobody had kept 
any look-out for the signs of the second coming 
and he had a notion that things would go on 
about as they were for a little time longer. 
George was a friend of mine, and I don't care if I 
did listen at the key-hole. Ezra Wilson had heard 
that over at the Seventh Day Settlement, they were 
airing out their ascension robes, and getting ready 
for the second coming. We children heard what 
Daddy said, for he had a big, carrying voice that 
would leak out of a little room and besides, he 
kept talking when the neighbors were going down 
the path. He just told them not to be fools, and 
said that if old George Walker was right and the 
world was much more than six thousand years 
old, that would simply strengthen what he had 
been telling them, that no such catastrophe had 
ever happened in the past and that was a very 
strong assurance that it was not going to take 



The Song and the Singer 127 

place now. These simple people were afraid of 
something, but it was kept from us and we did 
not have the slightest notion of what all the talk 
was about. Jerry Norton had called to us from 
way out in the lake, where he was fishing, that 
we had best sharpen up our tomahawks as there 
was going to be an Indian war. Nobody believed 
him, as a rule, but I think we concluded that he 
was telling the truth and began to think Indians. 
Now I was in no way prepared for what I saw, 
when coming out of a thick growth of poplars 
on the edge of a little marsh, I saw a great fiery 
body with a long tail of flame in the midnight 
sky, rushing straight toward me. Clesen Smith 
was no fool and he had said "it" would come in 
three days — and that was three days ago. All 
the world was more or less afraid of that big 
comet of sixty years ago ; is it any wonder that a 
lost child in the woods — lonely and afraid — 
should have been simply terror-stricken? A mad 
panic seized him and he ran like a frightened 
hare through under-brush and vines and bram- 
bles that scratched his face and tore his scanty 
clothes, insensible to every feeling except the de- 
sire to put all the space possible between himself 
and the awful thing that was going to hit the earth 
right near the poplar swamp where he first saw 
it. He kept it up till, panting and sobbing, he 
fell to the earth unable to proceed a single step 



128 What Birds Have Done With Me 

further; his race was run. How long he lay 
there, he never knew. He was roused out of the 
sleep of exhaustion by a voice, a calm, steady, 
deliberate voice, clearly unafraid of what was go- 
ing to happen to the world, saying over and over 
again: "Whip-poor-will, Whip-poor-will, Whip- 
poor-will"; and it was a disembodied voice, bird, 
animal, or human, he could not tell, but comfort- 
ing as the hand of his mother stroking his per- 
spiring head. He wanted to get closer and as 
he approached, it retreated; he forgot everything 
else, it was all swallowed up in the desire to get 
closer to the wonderful comforter. Ahead, he sud- 
denly saw a hole in the woods; they were coming 
to a clearing and in a moment more he was in a 
path that seemed familiar, and the next he knew 
there was Adolph Buzze swinging down the path 
toward him, singing a French song. When he 
got hold of his hard, strong hands, he held on, 
not saying very much, but just holding on. "Oh ! 
bird come every night. Some joke about whip- 
ping-Will; was no Will to lick. Oh! yes, about 
comet — that big joke, too. Mighty God, scare 
foolish children with Mr. Longtail, then he say 
Mr. Fire-eater, go chase yourself and he go, easy 
W." 

Good men, through my adolescence, on revival 
occasions were in the habit of trying to uncover 
hell, an anti-climax after the big comet, and 



The Song and the Singer 129 

though they tried to make us hear as well 
Heaven's last trumpet shaking the world below, 
what I really heard was "Whip-poor-will, Whip- 
poor-will, Whip-poor-will." Dear kindly voice 
that in my distressed childhood led me to Adolph 
and the home pathway where the cows had come 
of themselves, been milked, and were chewing 
their cuds as unmindful of the fiery comet as 
Adolph himself. How often in after years did the 
memory of all this come to me on silent wings with 
healing for spiritual ills and guidance to the green 
pastures and still waters where souls are restored. 
Woodrow Wilson has performed a stupendous 
service for humanity, the greatest conceivable 
service, when he liberated among selfish mankind 
a devotion to principle for which men were glad 
to give their substance and their lives. Among 
the clangor of sordid aims, the snarls of defeated 
profiteers, the vituperation of political enemies, 
one clear voice has risen, saying over and over 
again the same thing : the weak must be protected, 
the world made safe for the individual. What 
is to be the power to bring this to pass? The 
greatest in the world — spiritual force, — the only 
power that is adequate, on earth, to remove moun- 
tains of ignorance and selfishness. If you will, a 
dreamer is making a dream come true, preparing 
the world to see beauty that it has never seen; 
to hear music that it has never heard. Natural 



130 What Birds Have Done With Me 

beauty and natural music are so inherently spirit- 
ual that they can only be spiritually discerned. I 
am using this word spiritual in no narrow ecclesi- 
astical sense, but in the wide sense of oneness, 
with the only forces that, concealed by the tem- 
poral, are eternal. Brother, mine, the poor tem- 
poralities of life have prevented you from seeing 
the singer and hearing the song. 

Returning in the night, after an absence of 
more than four months, it seemed most fitting 
that the insistent reveille of the Loon should usher 
in the dewy freshness of the late April dawn, and 
be the fore-runner of a host of familiar voices 
that, also, woke the echoes of many a dim and 
far-away spring morning. I found myself not 
only listening to the cry of this particular Loon, 
but to every cry of the kind I had heard since 
childhood. It almost seemed as though these 
half-forgotten voices lived again, or else I was 
hearing the echoes of those long since smothered 
in the silence of death. When I first heard it, it 
seemed nothing less than the terrible voice of 
some unknown wild beast, or the lament of a lost 
soul in torment, and long after I knew the sound 
came from a bird and was possibly a love call, 
certain sub-conscious echoes, in my childish mind, 
would cause fear to show a leering face. 

The next voice was that of the Mourning Dove. 
Sweet and tender as the dawn, yet seemingly 



The Song and the Singer 131 

charged with an inexpressible plaint, an eternal 
lament, fitting it beyond any other wild thing, to 
tell its woeful story o'er and o'er amid the wreck- 
age of old battle-fields. Indeed, there seems no 
personal element in it — if it be grief at all, and 
from having been accustomed to think of it as 
expressed in exclusive lament for that fine lover, 
Cock Robin, dead before his time, a little stretch 
of the imagination, and lo! a universal lament 
over the wretchedness of humanity. 

Optimism is born again at the sound of the 
cheery voice of Cock Robin himself, very much 
alive and seemingly well satisfied with the world 
and life as he finds it, or at least putting up a 
splendid bluff. Mr. Woodpecker, I hear those 
sounds you are making, two blocks away, using a 
telephone for a drum and as an Irishman might 
say, while you are waking the echoes, you are not 
saying a word. 

The Song Sparrow, everybody's darling, is 
next; swinging back the cob-webbed doors into 
the music room of one's heart of hearts. 

Ah! I hear you, Mr. Red- Winged Blackbird, 
in the willows down by the lake, and your song 
is liquid sweetness, long drawn out, a joy forever; 
a thread of gold running through the years, a 
tinkling melody, not of the earth earthy. 

How good it seems to be at home; how inex- 
pressibly good to be at home with all these voices 
of Nature. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE LOVE ELEMENT IN BIRD PROTECTION 

The poet Bryant wisely calls attention to the 
fact that it is to those who held loving com- 
munion with Nature, to whom she speaks and 
for whom she has a message in all the changing 
conditions of human life. It is equally true that 
to those who do not love her, she is as silent as 
the Sphinx. Love is the key to the great realm 
of nature — the wonderful house of life. 

In a profound reverence for life, some of the 
vanished civilizations have mighty lessons to teach 
the man of to-day, who is dominated by his lust 
to kill. Egypt had its "sacred Ibis" and anyone 
killing it was guilty of murder and the punish- 
ment was death. Why was it thus highly es- 
teemed? Because in the old days "Ra came down 
from heaven and said unto one of the gods of 
Egypt: 'Thou art in my place and thou shalt be 
called Theth, the representative of Ra.' Then 
the majesty of the god of Ra spake unto Theth, 
saying: 'I will make something shining and re- 
splendent in the under-world and in the land of 
132 



The Love Element in Bird Protection 133 

the deep. And I, also, give unto thee power to 
send forth thy messengers.' Thereupon, the Ibis, 
the messenger of Thoth, came into being. The 
miraculous bird was beneficent in all his ways, 
destroying locusts, scorpions, serpents, and the 
noxious creatures which infested the country and 
its searching out and destruction of these enemies 
to the growing crops and to man himself led to 
the profound respect which this messenger of a 
god enjoyed." 

Theth, inventor of astrology and mathematics, 
the god of wisdom and magic, the one among 
them with divine power to restore the dead to 
life, and the Ibis became one and inseparable. He 
was often pictured as having the head of an Ibis, 
even when restoring the dead, and the picture of 
the bird is, indeed, the hieroglyphic of his name 
as well as the hieroglyphic for "the soul." Is it 
not possible that the weakness in the love element 
in our regard for bird-life will help explain why 
this all seems such nonsense to us. Nevertheless, 
much might be said in support of the belief that 
the bird is the gift of God, and in very fact in- 
separably associated with man's well-being on the 
earth — beneficent messengers meriting loving rev- 
erence. Having written thus, much of what will 
doubtless sound like ancient fable, may I be per- 
mitted to add a parable of the 19 19 model? 

Professor Blake, returning from a morning 



134 What Birds Have Done With Me 

walk brought in his hand the dead body of a 
small bird, looking strangely like a Canary. His 
three children gathered around him and he ex- 
plained to them that it was an American Gold- 
finch and not a Canary, though sometimes called 
one. Instantly the children lost interest when 
they found out that it was not a Canary and they 
were hunting up their playthings ; and it is doubt- 
ful if they heard him as he went on to tell them 
that the dead bird belonged to the family of Frin- 
gillidae and its correct name was Spinus tristis. 
Certain it is, that Spinus tristis had had no place 
in their affectionate little hearts. Finding that 
the children had no further interest in his find of 
the morning, the Professor tossed the dead bird 
out of the window, as a breakfast for the family 
cat. Just at that instant his wife came flying into 
the room with a bird-cage in her hand, — "Oh, 
John, Dicky is dead," she cried. Toys are dis- 
carded and every child takes up the wail, "Dicky 
is dead" — and it is a tender husband and father 
whose own eyes are misty as he attempts to com- 
fort his weeping family. Later on, he makes the 
little coffin and he and his wife stand at an upper 
window while the children conduct funeral serv- 
ices in the garden below. 

There is a stern pressure of the clasping hands 
of the parents when Baby comes to make the 
prayer. He is actually kneeling by the open grave 



The Love Element in Bird Protection 135 

and his troubled little face is lifted up to the blue 
dome of the sky as he says: "'Our Father in 
heaven, hallowed by thy name,' Dicky is dead, we 
are planting him in the garden, so please, 'Our 
Father in heaven, hallowed by thy name,' to keep 
him from taking cold so he can sing to us like he 
used to, when we come to heaven looking for him. 
Amen." 

Why the difference in the effect of the death 
of these two birds, looking so much alike, on this 
family? The answer is not far to seek. In one 
case, they had little knowledge and no affection. 
In the other they had intimate knowledge and 
great affection. After all, it is the love element 
that we must depend upon to save the remnant 
of vanishing wild birds. 

There is a profoundly philosophical statement 
to the effect that "things seen were not made by 
things that do appear." In other words, back 
of the tangible thing before us, are unseen and 
often remotely operating causes. In every life 
are what are called red-letter days — something 
sharply defined, a new point of view, the instan- 
taneous dominion of a strong emotion. Detach- 
ments of gray mist are deploying across a hillside 
in the early dawn of a May morning, after a 
night of rain. The big guns of the storm clouds 
had put on their barrage and their receding roar 
could be heard across the lake to the southwest. 



136 What Birds Have Done With Me 

The wind had fallen to a zephyr, the zephyr to a 
sigh and the sigh had faltered and died and the 
tremulous leaves of the poplars waited orders. 
Suddenly, out of the strangeness, out of the gray- 
ness, a part of the waiting silence, taking posses- 
sion of the universe, a red bird, a flame of fire, 
adding the visible presence of God to the mist- 
enclosed tabernacle in the wilderness. For this 
cause, the bare-footed boy had come into the for- 
est — he had mistakenly thought he had come in 
search of cattle — for he was a worshiper before 
it would have been possible to put the shoes from 
off his feet, had he had any on. Worship is a 
mysterious cradle in which love sleeps and dreams 
and grows strong and is made perfect. It was 
only a Scarlet Tanager, but it swiftly led him 
through all the stages and gradations of emotion, 
and a radiant vision of childhood was transformed 
into a tangible possession enriching all of life. 
James Lane Allen and Gene Stratton-Porter have 
each put their Cardinals into a volume, but my 
Tanager and the dreams and fancies connected 
with him are so much a part of the heart of me 
and the great heart of Mother Nature that prose 
seems inadequate and poetry itself could do little 
more than call attention to something beyond it, — 
like allusions to dawns and sunsets. Though the 
Scarlet Tanager did not make a great poet of me, 
it put great poetry into the woods and some of 



The Love Element in Bird Protection 137 

the very finest kind of blank verse into every-day 
life. There is no other bird like the Scarlet 
Tanager in the North woods and if you think it 
pagan to make a deity out of him, at least en- 
throne him as a High Priest in the temple of 
Beauty. 

Quite a good many years ago, we had snow on 
the thirtieth of May, and being out driving with 
my family we came around the base of a hill, and 
there before us not a hundred feet away, in a dead 
tree, were two birds not ten feet apart, — one an 
Indigo-Bunting and the other a Scarlet Tanager. 
A little daughter who had been studying the flags 
of all nations, said they were the colors of the 
English flag and then we saw them together 
against the snow-covered hill — Red, White and 
Blue. Looking back across a war-devastated 
world where a Peace Conference is now in session, 
the remote Memorial Day becomes exceptional — 
made so by two birds that quickly separated and 
snow that melted like a dream that all taken to- 
gether, for a brief moment gave us the colors in 
the flags of the three greatest nations on the face 
of the earth — England, France, America. 

Next to the Tanager, the Indigo-Bunting is our 
most beautiful bird. In the estimation of very 
many, he stands for the cloudless sky, the halcyon, 
the perfect day. Sky-blue, like truth in which 
there is no mixture of error, the whole apparel is 



138 What Birds Have Done With Me 

from a patch of the perfect blue above. As the 
Eagle is a national emblem so should our weather 
service adopt this calm serene Blue-bird as the 
fitting emblem of the kind of weather most de- 
sired. As a general favorite, the real Bluebird 
scores over the rarer and more reserved Bunting. 
Five hundred people know and love the Blue-bird 
where one never saw the other. In the north, the 
Blue-bird with the Robin is a harbinger of spring 
and is loved for his engaging ways ; winning ways, 
they surely are, as is proven by the large number 
of his friends. With the house Wren and Robin, 
his relations are close and almost confidential with 
man. The first thing on his return he comes 
around your home looking to see if in his absence 
you have provided him with a house, which is his 
first choice. If you have not done so, he finds a 
suitable place as close to you as possible, and goes 
to house-keeping. If your soul is not dead within 
you, the presence of such a neighbor is looked 
upon as a general improvement of the whole 
neighborhood. John Burroughs says that "the 
Blue-bird has the sky on his back and the earth 
on his breast." It seems as though he must have 
the red clay of Georgia in mind rather than the 
dark loam of Wisconsin. However this may be, 
the thought is fine, a dear familiar bird standing 
for both earth and sky. No weather is too cold 
for the Chickadee, or too warm for the Blue-bird; 



The Love Element in Bird Protection 139 

I never saw the first seek protection from the cold 
nor the second from the fiery rays of the sun. 
The Blue-bird, beyond any other bird I know, is 
a bird of the sun-light and will not live in the 
shade. On the lawn of my home, is a venerable 
apple tree, the last of a large pioneer orchard. 
It is partially hollow and principally decayed, but 
every year it buds and blossoms and puts forth 
a wealth of leaves that keeps the sun from pene- 
trating to the bole of the tree. Seeing Blue-birds 
casually investigating the tree, year after year, 
and never building in any of its numerous cavities, 
I concluded that it must be on account of the bad 
state of decay in which they found the trunk of the 
tree. So I put my latest thing in a bird-house in 
the deep shade in the center of the tree and the 
Blue-birds came and looked it over and did a lot 
of talking among themselves and then took up 
quarters else-where. Different models of houses 
were tried but with no success, and then I got a 
hunch; it's the shade. The neglected house in the 
tree was quickly moved to the top of a fence post 
up by the garden, all in the merry month of May, 
and in no time it was taken on a long-time lease 
and has not been vacant since. 

One year a pair of Blue-birds set up house-keep- 
ing about six feet from the ground, in an aban- 
doned Wood-pecker's hole, in the dismantled stub 
of an old apple tree. Nothing could have been 



140 What Birds Have Done With Me 

more public than the selection of a nesting place. 
It was on Hotel grounds and not two hundred feet 
from a tennis court and from the beginning of the 
nest building to the flight of the brood, people 
passed constantly and visitors frequently came in 
crowds. All this disturbed the birds not at all, 
and it did not require a whole lot of imagination 
to fancy the proud parents posing the babies for 
their pictures after they came out of the hole in the 
tree. It was a beautiful Summer-school where 
little children, world-weary people born and reared 
in cities, entered together a kindergarten where 
the teachers were birds that stood for the earth 
and the sky. 

Time spent in bird study that does not trans- 
form the student into the lover is time thrown 
away. Only spiritual forces can conquer material 
brute lust and selfishness. London-Bridge can be 
fiddled down and love can conquer Jungle-land. 
Just as soon as a large number of people place 
upon our bird neighbors proper aesthetic value — 
a value not to be computed in dollars and in 
cents — but in heart throbs and pure joy — we 
will be assured that love will bring about the ful- 
filling of the law. 

Nobody does anything in this world worth 
while except where action is the expression of an 
emotion, a sentiment not all of the earth earthy. 
Horse breeders, dairy-men, shepherds, chicken 



The Love Element in Bird Protection 141 

and dog fanciers and swine growers have a certain 
interest in the creature that occupies their thought 
and monopolizes their activities ; but I fancy that 
none of them would care to be reckoned the ac- 
tual lover of the creature they care for, while on 
the other hand those who care for birds are proud 
to be known as bird-lovers. A very learned and 
somewhat famous educator once wrote me offer- 
ing the chair of nature study in a school of which 
he was president and the letter went on to state 
that people who ought to know, had recommended 
me as an accomplished ornithologist. I wrote 
right back and said that there must be some mis- 
take, I was no ornithologist at all, never had 
claimed to be anything of the kind, and I was glad 
to be able to state that there was nothing in my 
past suggestive of King Herod — being only a bird- 
lover. 

Just as people are constantly asking you — if you 
happen to know ten lines of poetry — what is your 
favorite poem, so people are always asking me 
what is my favorite bird. The question puts me 
in the position of a person with a big family being 
asked which is the favorite child. It being more 
or less embarrassing, I have invariably tried to 
side-step it and even now I think I'll have to do 
the "Lady or the Tiger." There are Mourning 
Doves and Bronze Grackles; each has had a large 
place in my heart — which is the dearest dear, you 



142 What Birds Have Done With Me 

must decide. Before I tell their story, I wish to 
call attention to a general law. Intimate knowl- 
edge and close association are necessary conditions 
of real affection. Why the Dove and the Grackle? 
I have only the one answer; I have known them 
intimately since child-hood — they are old play- 
mates, 

"A burnt child dreads the fire" is the proverb, 
and an analysis of the why would show that the 
flame had burned itself deeply into the memory. 
I not only burned my fingers but my whole hand, 
and got a live coal into my apology for a shoe in 
rescuing a Mourning Dove's nest from a burning 
brush-pile. Never, mind about my eye-brows and 
my eye-winkers, I got the nest out that was just 
beginning to smoke and one bird lived, my very 
very first pet coming from the wild. With it 
perched upon my shoulder, I climbed several steps 
up toward a kingdom where things fly; it made 
me want to fly and later when it would make cer- 
tain little journeys in the world, I would pursue, 
running like the wind. Panting, breathless, de« 
spairing, certain it never would come back, it al- 
ways came straight as an arrow for its perch on 
my shoulder. Was ever a seven-year-old so en- 
vied by other boys, especially after Mourny 
learned to take a grain of corn from between my 
teeth, fluttering before my face as it did so? An- 
other trick was to pry open my clinched fingers 



The Love Element in Bird Protection 143 

with its bill for kernels of wheat held in my 
clasped hand. I, alas, had not heard in those days 
about Mahomet having something to eat in his 
ear when the multitude saw pigeons lighting on 
his shoulder to whisper to him, or I might also 
have gone into the prophet business. It's rank 
exaggeration to say of any thing that it's worth 
its weight in gold, but that was my estimate of 
my pet. It was never caged, but was left free to 
go and come, and it did both. It found its own 
kind and might spend a half day in the fields with 
other doves but always came home to roost. Many 
a time when bringing water from the well a hun- 
dred yards from the house, in the evening, it 
would come sweeping back and flutter along before 
my face pretending to be after corn from between 
my teeth. My older sisters said that I was a sissy 
and had taught it to kiss me. Perhaps I had not 
explained all of Mourny's tricks to them. I had 
been holding bags for a neighbor who had just 
finished thrashing and a lot of grain had been left 
around where the thrashing machine had stood 
and I had salvaged a big pocketful for Mourny 
and it was under my very eye having a feast in 
the open passage-way between the kitchen and 
wood-house, when coming from nowhere, a 
strange black and white torn cat launched itself 
on the unsuspicious Dove and killed it in one sec- 
ond. Sir Thomas clearly thought he was getting 



144 What Birds Have Done With Me 

some easy meat and clearly was in no way pre- 
pared for an avalanche of boy that was on him be- 
fore he could make way with his kill, knocked his 
prey out of his mouth and was seemingly bent on 
squeezing the breath of life out of him as well. 
The strong legs and powerful feet with their mur- 
derous claws made short work of the little hands 
that grasped the throat of the small tiger, that 
escaped after lacerating the hands of a child be- 
longing to the foolish human creatures who, for 
ages, have harbored it. That such things could 
be in the light of day had such a numbing effect 
upon him that he made no out-cry, the cat had 
done that and he had duly contrasted his red 
hands with the pitiful red feet of his pet, as he 
took the body out to the garden and buried it be- 
fore he allowed them to take him to old Dr. Shaw 
to stop the bleeding. Every Mourning Dove since 
has been a lineal descendant of Mourny and the 
wife and daughter, of the man writing this, have 
heard for the first time since this reminiscence 
was started, the name Mourny which all these 
years he had kept hidden in his heart. 

A certain Doctor of Divinity here in the South 
is known as a mighty hunter, and a notice in a 
city paper said that on a recent hunting expedi- 
tion, he had to his credit ( ?) thirty-three Mourn- 
ing Doves; let those who will call him Reverend 
Doctor, — to me he is nothing but an old Tom- 



The Love Element in Bird Protection 145 

cat, thirty-three times meaner than "Old Black 
and White Scratches." 

Cyclonic conditions had seemed imminent all 
the morning, but the storm did not break till near 
eleven o'clock and when it did come it was not a 
twister as had been feared, but a deluge of rain, 
a hail-storm and wind of a velocity that cuffed 
and broke great branches off trees as though in 
wild sport. A carriage load of people had sought 
refuge in our house, and when the storm was at 
its worst and we sat around the living room in 
almost perfect darkness; some sang and others 
prayed and we boys thought it a fine lark. Such 
convulsions of nature are not apt to last long and 
when all was over and we looked, amid indescrib- 
able wreckage of fences and tree-tops and heaps 
of hail-stones, there was a woebegone young 
Grackle that could neither fly nor walk but was 
still very much alive. One of our callers when he 
saw him said: "Holy Moses, did he rain down?" 
It seemed a good guess for as no Grackles had 
nested on the sand-hill a mile from any water, if 
the storm cloud did not bring him, his presence re- 
mained a mystery. First he was called Holy 
Moses, but later on just Moses, — never Mose. 
It is not altogether his black attire that suggests 
the ministerial character, but for a fact, with the 
possible exception of the Raven, he is the most 
sepulchral, stately and dignified of birds. Every- 



146 What Birds Have Done With Me 

body agreed that Moses was funny, took life and 
himself that seriously that it was positively funny 
just to look at him. When he walked it was the 
Lord Mayor of London leading a procession to be 
reviewed by the king, and then Moses was always 
lame which made it all the funnier. He could lose 
himself about the grounds, but his dignity, he 
could not lose. He was supposed to be a young 
bird just out of the nest when he first came, but 
soon that was questioned, he had such wise old 
ways. Those who took the side of youth pointed to 
the knock down fact that he had not yet learned to 
fly. In two weeks he was a very important mem- 
ber of the family, in four weeks he owned the 
place and instead of his living with us, we lived 
with him. Wescott's Brindle Bull dog attempted 
to cross our lawn and our dog Carlo, a mongrel 
but some fighter, went over the top to meet this 
Hun. It occurred by the back kitchen door and 
soon all was in wild tumult and Moses forgot 
himself to that degree that he flew up into a near- 
by tree — remaining there through the engage- 
ment, a kind of a war balloon giving Carlo point- 
ers. When the dog fight was over, he took up 
his old life and never again was known to attempt 
flight. To narrate all the queer things he did 
before a cat got him would make a book, and 
what I aim to do is quite the reverse. I simply 
wish to show that to the general acquaintance 



The Love Element in Bird Protection 147 

with the Grackles that I got when driving the ox 
teams on the breaking plough, is a close and inti- 
mate relation with the mysterious King of the 
Grackles who came out of the storm cloud and 
made his home with us. We did not capture him, 
he captured us. I, for one, did not know how 
much I loved him till the morning when he was 
not in any of his usual places and Cash Haskins, 
who was helping plant corn, accidentally stumbled 
on the remains of a cat's supper on the lawn where 
we saw him first. Yes, I'm frank to admit that 
I've always been fond of Grackles and what is 
more, at least, some Grackles have been fond 
of me. I presume that when one creature trusts 
another completely, if you could get at the facts 
you would find that trust bound up with a certain 
amount of fondness. 

Not so long ago on a misty morning, I was 
using a scythe among some shrubbery that I did 
not care to turn over to the tender mercy of a 
hired man. I found there a Mr. and Mrs. Bronze 
Grackle and five very callow babies in possession 
of the grass I wished to mow. I started in gin- 
gerly, thinking I would soon be ordered to go 
about my business, but strangely enough, the birds 
made no objection to my presence and there was 
neither distrust nor the faintest anxiety in their 
usual utterances. Still, I did not realize that these 
birds were paying me the highest compliment that 



148 What Birds Have Done With Me 

a wild bird can pay a human creature, — perfect 
confidence. A stranger came out there to see me 
on business and instantly there was blood on the 
moon. I took him by the arm and led him away 
but turned around and took off my hat to the 
birds, as genuinely touched as I ever was in my 
life. Five weeks in a darkened room, when your 
relation with the outer world was by means of a 
bulletin, giving pulse and temperature of which 
you know nothing. The head surgeon starting in 
at zero, no chance — then, one in ten, in five thou- 
sand. Then even; then, on the road to recovery 
and then, sit up day after to-morrow. But the 
night before the appointed time, I bribed the nurse 
to put two pillows under my head, raise the win- 
dow shade and let me have a look out. It was 
winter when they carried me into that room, it's 
spring now and in the park just across from the 
hospital a pair of Grackles are making a nest. 
My stately friends had brought the spring and all 
out-doors, so I could see it from my window — 
nests, new life, called back by two handfuls of 
straw and mud. 

A psychologist of some note has recently put 
forth the theory that black is not a color and if 
the mind is concentrated on this supposed some- 
thing, — that is really nothing, — sleep may be in- 
duced. It certainly is of some benefit in some 
kinds of insomnia. I started to concentrate on 



The Love Element in Bird Protection 149 

Poe's Raven whose color seems black, but black is 
not a color, so it's nothing; but I never felt quite 
at home with some-body's Raven so I naturally 
traded him for one of my own Grackles. I fol- 
low him across the lawn as I have seen him walk- 
ing a thousand times, he out-walks me; I grow 
weary, lose my way and later waking take up the 
chase again with the same result. Who knows, 
perhaps it will be the King of the Grackles who 
will gently lead me down to my last sleep. 



CHAPTER XIII 



MR. ESAU 



In introducing my friend Mr. Esau, I concede 
your right to an immediate explanation as to how 
a Rose-breasted Grosbeak became the possessor 
of such an extraordinary name. It's simple enough, 
which is probably true of all nick names, but we 
are not to lose sight of the fact that a nick name 
will not stick unless it has the approval of the 
majority of one's acquaintances. A Rose-breasted 
Grosbeak, a hospital case, — the hospital being a 
big wire cage, on a veranda, — was seen by a young 
lady and her mother, demurely kissing a feminine 
caller through the wires and what more natural 
than for the young lady to exclaim : "I saw Esau 
kissing Kate and the truth is we both saw" ; and as 
the act and the comment were both repeated, what 
more natural than for Mr. Grosbeak to become 
Mr. Esau. Then again, a brother had robbed a 
brother of his birth-right and in so doing had de- 
prived him of a blessing that included the dews of 
heaven and the fatness of the earth and love and 
song, of which corn and wine are the all too fee- 
150 



Mr. Esau 151 

ble symbols. An air-gun that, perhaps, a fond 
mother thought would make her future President 
manly in his tender years, had been the weapon 
used in the fracture of a wing, and this fracture 
meant the robbing of the organ-loft of a cathedral 
tree of a sweet and mysterious musician, intimate 
friend of Aeolian Harpists and rival of Apollo. 

Victory and defeat are often not more than a 
minute apart and one has a most unaccountable 
trick of usurping the place of the other. A small 
boy thrilled with victory as he beheld his ani- 
mated target falling fluttering through the limbs 
of the tree earthward, but when within reach of 
his hand the splash of red on the breast was mis- 
taken for blood, and overwhelmed with remorse 
and shame, he took to his heels ; and it was quite 
another boy, who knew nothing of the catastrophe, 
that picked up the wounded bird by the roadside 
and carried it to his teacher at school and she, figu- 
ratively speaking, put a red cross upon him, and 
had the patient rushed to my hospital for neces- 
sary surgery. 

Like his great prototype, my Mr. Esau was a 
cunning hunter and a creature of the field and in 
addition, I found him to be one of my most im- 
possible patients fighting each and every measure 
attempted for his betterment, with the obstinacy 
of a martyr and the long-suffering of a saint. The 
difficulty was not in applying the starched bandage 



152 What Birds Have Done With Me 

to the nicely adjusted fragments of the greatest 
wing bone; the difficulty came in when we at- 
tempted to hold the broken wing in its proper 
place. So to speak, Mr. Esau refused to carry 
his arm in a sling and if there can be any such 
thing as silent eloquence, he eloquently announced 
his unalterable determination to die first. With 
some feeling akin to what Darius Green enter- 
tained for the Wren, my gray matter, plus that 
of a host of helpful friends, was combined in an 
effort to out-wit a single broken-winged, improp- 
erly nourished mite of a bird, who scored over us 
as the afore-mentioned Wren did over Darius, in 
his attempts at flight. A four-tailed bandage, the 
size of six postage stamps, laid out two and two, 
with a tape sewed to each corner and holes cut 
for the legs, when afore-mentioned tapes were 
criss-crossed and tied over the back, was impul- 
sively called Eureka, but should have been Ap- 
pomattox, for in less than six hours I found my- 
self kneeling upon the worthless contrivance and 
humbly proffering my "Catlin" to Mr. Esau and 
expressing the hope that he would condescend to 
use my Rush Diploma as his door-mat. Though 
bull-dog tugging at the bandage would not re- 
lieve him of it, it never failed to pull it around 
enough so that he could not use his legs, and en- 
able him to turn turtle; the sight of his red keel 



Mr. Esau 153 

uppermost wrecked faith, hope and charity every 
fifteen minutes. • 

I had rather be chief cook for a hundred lumber 
jacks than personal chef for a single caged Gros- 
beak. Mrs. Rorer herself would have had to 
work over time to devise dishes that would tempt 
so capricious an appetite. Potato bugs were out 
of season and Crickets and Grass-hoppers in Kin- 
dergarten classes ; Dragon-flies cruising as subma- 
rines and June-bugs undrilled for street concerts; 
the White Grub was my refuge and help in trou- 
ble. How he loved them ! He would eat a half 
a pint in a day. It was a banquet twelve hours 
long and he Fletcherized each individual grub. 
He would hop about the cage with a fine fat 
beauty sticking out of the side of his mouth, sug- 
gesting a devotee getting the very last whiffs from 
a quarter inch long cigarette. He would not eat 
an angle worm on compulsion, or in any other 
way, and rejecting cherries and lush strawberries, 
always made believe that he had a well-bred lik- 
ing for grape-fruit. Hemp-seed he cracked for the 
sake of the recreation it afforded, having clearly 
no great liking for the kernel except as it helped 
to balance his White Grub ration. He never at- 
tempted to sing the songs of the tree-tops in his 
narrow prison-house and how his kind learned of 
his predicament, I have no more way of knowing 



154 What Birds Have Done With Me 

than I have of what they thought of it after pay- 
ing him repeated visits. Almost every day he 
would have visitors, both male and female, com- 
ing singly, as a rule, and perching upon his cage 
for about the length of time that is given to the 
formal call, and my wife and daughter are posi- 
tive that they kissed at parting. I take it that 
the calls were more or less formal, for they never 
brought him any thing to eat, neither did he ever 
offer to share his grub with them. I confess to 
having failed to get any key to the mystery of 
their communication and yet there is every reason 
to believe that the misfortune of one of their num- 
bers made quite a lasting impression upon the 
minds of his Grosbeak neighbors and friends. 
Proof of this statement will be offered later on. 

When the last bandage was removed, it was 
found that the bones had knit properly and he 
had pretty fair use of his wing, but it drooped 
and could not be held in place and extended 
flight was still a question. For two weeks more 
this question kept him in Hospital; the last night 
came, his splendid progress would demand the 
opening of the door at dawn, returning him to 
the blessed earth, the mysterious fellowship of all 
aerial voyagers, — free, free, free ! The ways of 
life and death are past finding out. The dawn 
came, but the door was not opened, the good 
wing and the mended one were equally helpless, 



Mr. Esau 155 

and on the bottom of the cage was a rigid little 
body, the worthless remains of what we had 
known as Mr. Esau. Perhaps the eyes blurred a 
little and the hand was not usually steady when 
certain rites and ceremonies were being performed 
that were destined to change Mr. Esau into, not 
only a stuffed Grosbeak, but a whole sermon on 
the text, "Who being dead yet speaketh." 

Making my annual bird-talk to the village 
school, shortly after the death of the Grosbeak, 
I took his skin with me and told his story and let 
the children of the lower grades not only see 
but handle the patched-up wing, the only witness 
called for a time; but in the fifth grade I re- 
ceived a hunch and shading my eyes with my hand 
I began to look for the guilty boy; after a pre- 
tended unsuccessful search, I said in substance: 
"No, he is not here and if he was I would not 
point him out, for you all hate him, hate him be- 
cause he is a robber and has robbed you and me 
of something of the sweetness and melody of the 
spring-time and to this there is to be added the 
hideous blood-lust that is supposed to lurk in jun- 
gles." "Children," I continued, "I want you to 
foe very sorry for this boy's mother — poor, poor 
soul, how I pity her, in ignorance of his real char- 
acter, — sneaking, cowardly, pitiless, — she is 
doubtless hoping, believing, praying that her son 
will turn out a splendid man, a leader of men." I 



156 What Birds Have Done With Me 

doubtless said too much, but Mr. Esau's shade — 
I'll not say skin, for ordinarily they are denied 
the power of speech — said even more and the 
children were as eager to get hold of the killer 
as they had been to handle the skin of the thing 
killed, and I am quite sure it would not have been 
anything like as gently. 

Bright and early Saturday morning following, 
the girl said there was a boy in the outer office 
to see me and when she sent him in I half caught 
my breath, for my hunch was true and I had se- 
lected the right urchin in No. five School-room. 
Though scarcely ten years of age, he was quite 
an old friend of mine, and I patted him on the 
shoulder and for the fortieth time, I reminded him 
of the bitter fight he put up at the age of five 
when I vaccinated him. However much he had 
been in the habit of rewarding my reminiscence 
with a pleased little grin, no ghost of anything of 
the kind was on duty nor could be called from 
afar. 

Clearly Billy was in trouble, and the world 
over, the deeper the trouble, the more difficult it 
is to get rid of the perilous stuff that weighs upon 
the heart. He was over-whelmed by a mountain 
that stood squarely across his pathway and could 
only say when I asked him what the matter was : 
"Oh! nothen Doc, — that is, nothen much." He 
evidently found the room warm and I told him 



Mr. Esau 15? 

to take a seat by the window till he was ready to 
talk. A surreptitious glance revealed the fact that 
Billy's chin was trembling and he had frequent 
furtive uses for his dirty little handkerchief, so 
swinging around I delivered a "mercy shot" — 
"Don't feel bad, son, I '11 never tell any one that 
it was you who shot the Gros-beak." 

I do not intend to be thought flippant in the 
presence of real grief when I say that before you 
could say "Jack Robinson," Billy had hold of my 
hand, sobbingly demanding that I "Cross my heart 
and hope to die." As there were still some duties 
and pleasures not worn entirely thread-bare, I de- 
murred at the latter half of his demand and we 
compromised on the first clause to his entire sat- 
isfaction. No possible question of the soundness 
of Billy's conversion or the honesty of his desire 
to become a Billy Sunday among Junior Audubon 
Evangelists. Before many audiences in many 
parts of the country, thus did Mr. Esau win his 
victories so that if ever canonized and given a 
new name it will be entirely proper to call him 
after some great evangelist. I walked part way 
home with Billy and at the turn in the road this 
was his parting confidence: "If you had told, I 
don't 'spect it would have made so much differ- 
ence with the fellows, but I know the girls would 
all 'spized me." 

A year after the long struggle with Mr. Esau, 



i^8 What Birds Have Done With Me 

the one who had carried it on was himself a 
pn'soner on the same veranda, not in a cage but a 
wheel chair, contrary beyond question but not so 
much so as he might have been had it not been 
for the flittering ghost of Mr. Esau acting as a 
horrible example. Grosbeaks are shy birds of 
the tree-tops, who reverse the conduct of good 
little boys by being more often heard than seen, 
so it becomes difficult to imagine my surprise to 
have one come into the ornamental wood-work 
at the top of the veranda; and here follows the 
proof that they had not forgotten the poor cap- 
tive of the preceding year; a maid brought out a 
canary and hung the cage under the veranda and 
coming from nowhere almost instantly, there was 
a Grosbeak on it clearly looking for Mr. Esau. 
Singly it seemed as though each Grosbeak visited 
the cage once only and there were no kisses at 
parting. Dickey was to them no yellow peril and 
there was neither race war nor affection between 
them, — only the Alps of an impassable indiffer- 
ence. Coming back to my own "vine and fig tree" 
from a hospital that for me had been down close 
by the gates of death, it is impossible for me to 
make any one understand how much the Gros- 
beaks did for me when it became evident that 
among humans I was the one to be trusted. All 
that Spring, always excepting Chickadees, no other 
birds had ever been so intimate, almost confiden- 



Mr. Esau 159 

tial, — if such a word can be used in connection 
with a bird. They Fletcherized their food, made 
love, fought their little battles, told their stories 
and sang their songs, as though I was quite one of 
them. To some it will seem like extravagant 
sentiment, even when considered in the light of the 
thick coming fancies of a sick man, but to this day 
I feel that I shall stumble and lose my way if I 
attempt to tell all that is in my heart of the minis- 
try of these wild bird friends who visited me 
when I could not go to the forest where Spring 
and Summer meet. 

"Ah! who shall lift the wand of magic power, 
And the lost clew regain ? 
The unfinished window in Aladdin's tower 
Unfinished must remain." 



CHAPTER XIV 

STUPIDITY STREET 

In an editorial having the caption; "The Strong 
Things in Life," the "Times-Picayune" of New 
Orleans, quoted the following lines from the poems 
of Ralph Hodgson and I know of nothing to be 
found elsewhere that is a more remarkable epi- 
tome of the whole question of "Bird Protection." 

"I saw with open eyes 
Singing birds sweet 
Sold in the shops 
For people to eat, 
Sold in the shops of 
Stupidity Street. 

"I saw in a vision 
The worm in the wheat, 
And in the shops nothing 
For people to eat; 
Nothing for sale in 
Stupidity Street." 

Here, in a nut shell, is the whole matter; it is 
stupid to kill song birds for food, they are the 
1 60 



Stupidity Street 161 

real wardens of all growing things, they stand be- 
tween the worm and the wheat field ; kill them all 
and there will be nothing for sale in "Stupidity 
Street." There is no escaping the inference of 
the poem. The man who uses a song bird as an 
animated target, destroying an insectivorous bird 
for a tidbit to tickle the palate of a would-be epi- 
cure, may not be a criminal, but alas, is one of a 
multitude — all of whom live on over-crowded 
"Stupidity Street." Follow the people home who 
are guilty of wantonly destroying our vanishing 
wild life, and you will find, with scarcely an ex- 
ception, that they all live on Stupidity Street. If 
I were a devout churchman, I would suggest this 
addition to the Prayer Book: from the besotted 
ignorance of "Stupidity Street," Good Lord, de- 
liver us. 

Here is a very sad case ; a beautiful, very beau- 
tiful church, to which the waves sing their finest 
battle and love songs and the leaves of the Live- 
Oaks tell their secrets, and wild-bird singers on 
the outside outrival the best efforts of the hu- 
man choirs within, and the church is called "The 
Church of the Redeemer." There is a Rectory 
and a Rector, everything quite proper, and all 
located on Stupidity Street — for the Holy man is 
a killer of insectivorous birds and no voice has 
been raised against him in "The Church of the Re- 
deemer." If the man of God does not know that 



1 62 What Birds Have Done With Me 

a Dove is worth more to agriculture to-day than 
for sacrifice in the old days, and more for aesthetic 
reasons than for pie, he should go to school again 
and be re-ordained. 

It would seem that the church whose altars, 
through dim, dark and dreadful ages had dripped 
with the blood of young Pigeons and Doves could 
do no less, by way of expiation for that bloody 
past, than turn all the power of its efficient organ- 
ization to conserve what is left of wild-life. 

The sacred part of a temple has, of late years, 
become associated with bird protection — sacred- 
ness like a thread of gold clinging to our tardy 
efforts to save our vanishing wild life. Those 
enlisted in the Grand Army of Bird Protection 
are not Crusaders, struggling to rescue from the 
unbeliever a Holy Sepulcher; they are the Master 
Builders for the coming years and their sanctu- 
aries will be filled with life and song: 

"Till the sun grows cold, and the stars grow old 
And the leaves of the judgment-book unfold." 

He who builds for the future, struggling to 
improve conditions affecting all the people for all 
time, is engaged in the only holy war that has 
ever been waged in the history of mankind. A 
stainless soldier is the one who fights for principle 
and is a victor glorified compared to the one 



Stupidity Street 163 

whose motives are sordid or corrupt. The "City 
of Refuge" and the "Horns of the Altar" are 
some way, more or less closely associated with 
the "Bird Sanctuary," as we know it to-day. It is 
perfectly wonderful how soon the wild things 
come to know where they are safe. When a mis- 
guided politician in my own county had an open 
season on the remnant of our prairie chickens — 
protected for years — the amazed and terrified 
birds collected on the Maplewood Audubon Res- 
ervation — our farm — and walked about the lawn 
like domestic chickens, a wounded bird com- 
ing with the rest, and actually died under my 
office window. Only the other day a beautiful 
golden woodpecker, having been shot by some 
miscreant, came back to our Sanctuary and died 
upon my doorstep and the blood that dripped 
from step to step cried out in mute protest against 
the evil doer who kills for sport, fixing upon him 
blood-guiltiness; and I saw the stain upon my 
doorstep magnified into a stain upon the land 
that fails to prevent the shedding of innocent 
blood. We ask nothing less than America as a 
vast Sanctuary for song and insectivorous birds. 
That there is no difference between North and 
South except in the matter of roasting coffee and 
whether we shall have cold bread or hot bis- 
cuit for supper, I am sorry to say isn't quite true, 
for there is a custom in the whole South of shoot- 



164 What Birds Have Done With Me 

ing song and insectivorous birds that goes back 
to the first settlement of the country and the pro- 
fessional man, the business man and the negro, 
with his three dollar gun, are all defying the fed- 
eral law and are active as ever in bird destruction. 
Bird protection has utterly failed to get the moral 
support of the best people in even fairly pro- 
gressive cities and where this is so, what can 
you expect of lewd fellows of the baser sort in 
little villages and back country places? 

Biloxi, Mississippi, long a winter resort for 
Northern people, ought to be more progressive 
than the average city, and yet after five winters of 
persistent work for bird protection, talking in all 
their schools and writing articles for the city pa- 
pers, I am frank to say I can see small results. 
The same paper that published my protest against 
killing Mocking-birds, published a vitriolic re- 
joinder from a woman who attempted to justify 
the killing on the ground that she preferred straw- 
berries to Mocking birds. Nothing that I have 
ever written about birds has been refused pub- 
lication in city papers and the schools clamor 
for more talks — they could not be worth less than 
they cost — and I am called the "Bird-man" and 
"Bird's Attorney" and my acquaintance with the 
children of the public school is extensive, but I am 
assured by good lawyers that no jury would con- 
vict were I to have a person arrested for viola- 



Stupidity Street 165 

tion of the Federal law, whatever the evidence 
against the prisoner. 

I am going to take the public into my confidence 
and say that the lady of whom we have rented 
apartments for the last five years is a good friend 
and I felt pretty sure that I had made one con- 
vert when she had her ten-year-old son, last win- 
ter, throw away his air-gun, but on our return in 
December this year, I found she had given him 
an ante-Christmas present of the largest and best 
air-gun on the market and he and his little chums 
were killing birds, as their fathers had before 
them. 

There are exceptions to all general rules but 
generally speaking so far as economic and aesthetic 
appreciation of birds go, I am forced to locate 
even my friends on that street whose name is the 
name of this chapter. On this point I want to 
quote from an account of a brief visit to an in- 
terior town twenty miles from New Orleans where 
for four days my friend, Creswell J. Hunt, be- 
ginning on February 20th, 19 18, took a bird cen- 
sus. The deep, dark and awful ignorance that he 
encountered — every solitary soul living on Stu- 
pidity Street — is almost beyond belief. Here is 
an extract from his report that speaks for itself. 
"While the residents of southern Louisiana seem, 
one and all, to have a great affection for the Mock- 
ing bird, this species seems to be about the only 



1 66 What Birds Have Done With Me 

one for which there is any aesthetic feeling. Other 
birds appeal to them entirely according to the 
quality of the bird's flesh and this makes the work 
of the Department of Conservation very difficult 
in enforcing its laws for the protection of the in- 
sectivorous birds. These people have shot Robins 
and Wood Thrushes and Vireos and King-birds 
all their lives and it is difficult to explain to them 
why they should stop it now, and still harder to 
keep them from killing these birds. Mr. A. E. 
Manint, the Department of Conservation's agent 
in St. Tammany Parish, has done remarkably 
good work in protecting the birds in his terri- 
tory and, at the same time, has kept the good 
will of the people. He has been diplomatic, and 
from what I saw, it appears that most of the 
people like him and respect his authority. 

"People with whom I talked knew the birds 
by local names — to me entirely new names — and 
in many cases it was difficult to tell what species 
they were talking about as their efforts to describe 
the bird's appearance were often very misleading. 
For instance they told me that I should be there a 
little later when the "Pops" came. Their hand- 
somest bird, they said, was the "Red Pop," while 
the "Blue Pop," and the "Green Pop" were also 
beauties. I later found that their "Red Pop" is 
the male Painted Bunting or Nonpareil, while 
their "Green Pop" is the female of this species. 



Stupidity Street 167 

And the "Blue Pop" is the male Indigo Bunting. 

Then they told me about the "Big Caille" — 
(pronounced Big Ki) — the game bird par ex- 
cellence — a bird that feeds upon the magnolia 
seeds; a bird whose flesh some of the most famous 
French chefs had pronounced the finest eating in 
the world. And then there was the "Little Caille" 
and the "Black Caille," both shot along with the 
"Big Caille," but the flesh of the "Big Caille" 
surpassed them all. From the descriptions given 
me I decided that this "Big Caille" must surely be 
one of our Thrushes, and I later found this to be 
correct. The "Big Caille" — the most famed of 
all the game birds — is none other than the Wood 
Thrush. I have always heard the Wood Thrush 
praised but never from this standpoint. I have 
heard the Wood Thrush proclaimed the finest 
singer in North America. No doubt, with us, the 
species ranks foremost in aesthetic value. To 
many of us Northerners, it is indeed the bird of 
birds. It is, perhaps, the last bird we would 
care to slaughter. But down around Mandeville, 
they love the "Big Caille" — when browned just 
right and served upon the table. And there is 
perhaps more hard feeling against the Depart- 
ment of Agriculture for prohibiting the killing of 
the Wood Thrush than there is about the protec- 
tion of any other bird. 

The Olive-backed Thrushes are killed under the 



1 68 IV hat Birds Have Done With Me 

name of "Little Caille" and the Cat-bird, under 
the name of "Black Caille." 

Louisiana has one of the best State Conserva- 
tion Commissions, but I am a great believer in the 
long arm of Uncle Sam, whose officials are inde- 
pendent of votes and in spite of some very excel- 
lent work done, a raid the other day gathered in 
a negro with a barrel of pickled Robins, and fif- 
teen whites, among them deputy sheriffs and busi- 
ness men. Though the state officers do their best, 
no one in that bunch, possibly excepting the col- 
ored man, will get a fine calculated to make any 
one sit up and take notice. The migratory bird 
not being the property of any state is very prop- 
erly the ward of the Federal government and with 
all possible assistance from state organizations, 
its protection must be brought about through Na- 
tional intervention. As an Irishman might say: 
"The Western Front is in the South" for the great 
battle to make the whole country safe for song 
and insectivorous birds will be fought there and 
efforts to conserve and protect cannot long con- 
tinue when one-half the territory is being swept 
and combed by hunters who kill everything that 
flies. The Street must be taught the sweetness 
of bird-song, the utter shamefulness of robbing 
nature of her most beautiful and attractive forms 
of life, for in exquisite coloring many flowers are 
wingless birds and many birds only winged flowers, 



Stupidity Street 169 

plus their song. To take birds out of poetry 
would be like taking tune out of music, — noth- 
ing left but idiotic jargon. 

Birds are poetry per se and cannot be replaced 
by other living creatures in poems where they 
figure, without turning fine poetry into caricature. 
Here is the proof of the above statement; I will 
first give Tennyson's Poet Song, then caricature 
it by simply putting an animal in the place of the 
bird. 

The rain had fallen, the Poet arose, 
He pass'd through the town and out of the street ; 
A light wind blew from the gates of the sun 
And waves of shadow went over the wheat, 
And he sat him down in a lonely place 
And chanted a melody loud and sweet, 
That made the wild swan pause in her cloud, 
And the lark drop down at his feet. 

The swallow stopt as he hunted the bee, 

The snake slipt under a spray, 

The wild Hawk stood with the down on his beak, 

And stared, with his foot on the prey. 

And the nightingale thought, "I have sung many 

songs, 
But never a one so gay 
For he sings of what the world will be 
When the years have died away." 

Beginning with the last two lines of the first 



170 What Birds Have Done With Me 

That made the wild Ass pause in her race 
And the frog drop down at his feet. 

The old bear paused as he hunted the bee, 
A snake slipped under a spray 
And a rooster stood with the down on his beak 
And stared with his foot on the prey. 

The Moo-cow said, "I've lowed many a song 
But never a one so gay 
For he sings of what the world will be 
When the years have died away." 

There is still worse caricature than this, the 
worst imaginable; instead of the music of the wild 
— the choir made invisible by the boughs of a ven- 
erable brotherhood of trees, you send skulking 
through these dream haunted shades, the man 
with a gun, the mean brother of a wolf who being 
able to comprehend beauty, destroys it; able to 
comprehend music, seeks to silence it forever — 
let us pillory forever that libel on God's crea- 
tures. 

Let me whisper it; the people on the Street are 
ignorant, — deeply, darkly, densely ignorant. 
They don't know the first thing of the laws that 
govern the world in which they live and move 
and have their being. To them the house of life 
has not only had the shades down and the blinds 
closed, but it has been barred and double pad- 



Stupidity Street 171 

locked. Nobody on the Street has sought to find 
a key where it is to be found, in the origin of life 
itself. All life has a common origin, an invisible 
cell — protoplasm. Countless billions of different 
creatures live on the earth, in the water, and in 
the air, they are all struggling for existence, and 
each uses the more or less feeble spark of intelli- 
gence implanted within it. Now there is not a 
creature on the face of the earth, the huge ele- 
phant and the tiny aphis that destroys a rose leaf, 
that left to breed unchecked would not crowd 
everything else off the planet. The people on the 
Street know nothing of Nature's marvelous fer- 
tility and power of reproduction. The human 
mind staggers in attempting to grasp this appal- 
ling thing. Linnaeus, the great naturalist, study- 
ing the so-called "plant lice" found that in one 
year a single aphis would produce a quintillion of 
descendants. How do you write a quintillion 
using the English method of enumeration? Write 
the figure one and after it thirty zeroes. The sec- 
ond year, from one single aphis you would have a 
number of descendants that to represent, you 
would have to write the figure one and sixty 
zeroes. Thus from a creature so small that you 
can scarcely see it, if all its young were allowed to 
live and breed, in a very short time, there would 
pile up a loathsome mass of aphids greater in 
bulk than the world itself. Malthus was right; 



172 What Birds Have Done With Me 

all forms of life, unchecked, breed to destructive 
numbers. That life may be, all forms of life 
must be held in check by their natural enemies. 
If the people on the Street knew this and the ad- 
ditional fact that the bird is the check upon the 
noxious weed and noxious insect, they would con- 
serve rather than destroy. It is worse than stupid 
to kill our bird friends to-day — it is criminal. 
Whole species have been exterminated, many 
others are on the verge of extermination, and all 
species are frightfully depleted, and when all are 
gone, life itself will quickly pass with the flutter 
of the last wing. 

Gone — This little word of four letters may be 
compared to a gray wall shutting out the sunlight; 
a vast desert, where life has been and is not, — a 
desolation, a haunting memory — the sadness of an 
irreparable loss. There is the sadness of fare- 
wells in the recollection of trackless forests, swept 
by the destroyer, from the face of the earth, and 
with them so many of the wood-folk have gone 
forever. The cultivated field, the populous city, 
are not places where mother nature may be seen 
and studied at her best. Sylvan dells, sweet songs, 
gliding dryads, and dancing fairies are not to be 
found along the desolation of paved streets. 
Scores of the dear familiar neighbors of my child- 
hood are gone forever. Across the dawn, I look 
in vain for the strong, swift sweep of countless 



Stupidity Street 1 73 

wings. The great flocks have gone never to re- 
turn. This, of itself, is a reason for conserving 
what is left, gathering up the fragments and pro- 
tecting them, that species may not be utterly ex- 
terminated. 

Yesterday we were all for slaughter, but we 
grow frightened to-day, in desolate places from 
which teeming life has gone, and the hopeful signs 
of the times are to be found in waves of bird pro- 
tection and bird legislation sweeping the land. 
Yesterday, the "Wild life refuge" — the sanctuary, 
lived only in the imagination of a few dreamers; 
to-day the dream has come true and the people 
of these Sovereign States are demanding pre- 
paredness for the efficient protection of the piti- 
ful remnant of the "Wild Life" before all is for- 
ever gone. 

The famous French publicist, Emile Boutroux, 
in an article on the idealism and statesmanship 
of President Wilson, gives a view of its compre- 
hensiveness that is wonderful and I know of noth- 
ing else that has ever been written that could be 
adapted to explain my notion of an all-reaching 
bird protection that will protect. Here is the 
quotation above referred to: "He is, above all, 
desirous of thinking, not in East-American terms, 
nor in those of the South, the West, or the North, 
but in all-American terms. His idealism combines 
whatthe diverse populations making up the United 



174 What Birds Have Done With Me 

States have together contributed to the national 
spirit; the Puritan notion of duty and respon- 
sibility; the generous and humane democracy of 
the Mississippi Valley; the independent, equality- 
loving, though conservative, spirit of the South; 
and the practical activity of them all." In another 
place he says: "It was not the will of an indi- 
vidual, but that of a whole people which, conscious 
of its ability to accomplish any end submitted 
humbly this omnipotence to the authority of the 
moral law and of the ideal." 

In bird protection, I see what, in effect, will 
be a League of States — the whole preventing any 
one state from laying violent hands upon and de- 
stroying what is the property of all the states; — 
bird-protection; "Of the people, by the people, 
for the people." And when that glad day dawns, 
"To Rent" will be in every window on "Stupidity 
Street." 



CHAPTER XV 

JAYS AND CROWS 

By common consent the birds whose names 
stand at the head of this chapter are members of 
a most disreputable family and are sure enough 
undesirables and should be deported to that ex- 
cessively hot and waterless region from whence 
they came. It's as clear as mud that black and 
blue are the colors of assault and battery and as- 
sault and battery is a flourish, common way down 
in the dregs of society, where laborers fight and 
drunken brutes whip their wives and eyes are deco- 
rated with the colors of the Jay and the Crow. 
Not everything can be allowed in the best so- 
ciety and, it will scarcely permit the bare mention 
of anything so coarse and common and Bolshevist 
as blue marauders and black robbers. Believing 
every one innocent until proved guilty is reversed 
in the case of the prisoners at the bar, who are re- 
quired to prove their innocence after being ar- 
rested on suspicion and tried before prejudiced 
juries. As their attorney, though without a re- 
tainer, I shall stand upon the rights of my clients 
i75 



176 What Birds Have Done With Me 
to a separate trial and to summon essential wit- 
nesses at any cost with usual adjournments taken 
in their absence. 

If the court please, I demand the dismissal of 
the case on two points, the first of which is that 
there is no evidence of guilt, or even serious mis- 
demeanor against the defendants, and the second, 
that the plaintiffs have not been made to put up 
security for costs. 

I object, Your Honor, to excusing the plaintiffs 
from the usual security for costs as it establishes 
the dangerous principle of allowing the quarrel- 
some and ignorant a free hand in jeopardizing the 
liberty of any one so unfortunate as to incur their 
displeasure, and they themselves escape all re- 
sponsibility in the matter at issue. 

If the court please, we will proceed to examine 
the allegations in the complaint against the Blue 
Jay. Again, Your Honor, I ask the dismissal of 
this case against the Jay on the ground that every- 
thing in the complaint, from first to last is clearly 
dictated by prejudice, based upon hearsay; ob- 
servations of the blind and the silly drivel of the 
uninformed, who babble to hear themselves bab- 
ble. 

Gentlemen of the Jury, getting a single kernel 
of wheat out of an overflowing bushel of chaff, 
constituting an alleged complaint against my client, 
let us proceed to examine the so far unproven 



Jays and Crows 177 

charge that the Jay is a notorious nest robber and 
devourer of the helpless young of other birds. 
As this is a case based upon general suspicion 
rather than a specific act it will turn upon prov- 
ing the previous good character of the defendant, 
if that is possible. Now, if His Honor will order 
me sworn I will take the witness stand on be- 
half of my client, who has been a close friend of 
mine for the last fifty years. Fifty years, Gen- 
tlemen of the Jury, is a long time and a man and 
a bird ought to get to know something of each 
other in such a period, and had I not flattered my- 
self that I know him better than most people I 
would not have volunteered to act as his attorney 
in this case. Certainly I will not stand by and 
see him wronged, for I can say of him, what I 
cannot say of all my friends, that up to date I 
never knew him to do anything unworthy of a 
gentleman and a scholar. 

Our acquaintance started on a cold day and it 
has been getting warmer and warmer ever since. 
I saw him as the only bit of blue on a gray winter 
day and he scolded and laughed at me by turns, 
from a limb of the "tip-top" wood that consti- 
tuted our first wood-pile and made me ashamed 
to cry with the cold, after a thirty mile ride, as I 
carried in my first armful to start the first fire 
in my father's log-cabin that stood for a home 
in the wilderness. Always regarding him as a 



178 What Birds Have Done With Me 

gentleman I of course, never asked him to eat out 
of my hand, but I have given him something with 
a stick and possibly my health was better just 
afterward. To be a little more definite, I have 
handed him a meal-worm at the end of a split 
stick as he sat on the edge of his nest after a 
hard day's work in the support of his family and 
I'll swear he bowed when he received it, and 
every man has a right to his opinion so why may 
I not be allowed to believe that if I could have 
translated his remark, it would have been: "Your 
health, old duffer, and may you live long and pros- 
per." 

Gentlemen of the Jury, I am not trying to put 
anything over you when I assure you that this 
bird, so commonly maligned and slandered, is in 
very fact, "my friend Yorick, a fellow of infinite 
jest and most excellent fancy" and it's no exag- 
geration to say that I had much rather see him 
on any single day in the three hundred and sixty- 
five than a book agent or a tax collector and he 
would be twice as welcome, if he saw fit to make 
me a pastoral call, as the professional Soul Saver. 
Perhaps he may be shockingly worldly, but a fair- 
minded man knowing him in his domestic, social 
and civic relations to life could scarcely withhold 
at least a small measure of admiration. The 
world is full of snivelers who are not willing to 



Jays and Crows 179 

weep alone but want every one to go into the lawn 
sprinkler business with them and along comes Mr. 
Jay and flaunts his sky blue in their faces and 
says, as clearly as a bird can: u Oh! Patience 
don't mention it; people have enough of that with- 
out making a community service of it so just pack 
your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, 
smile." 

My friend Yorick should be especially dear 
to the heart of Ella Wheeler Wilcox for he laughs 
whether the world laughs with him or not and 
however much you persecute him with your guns, 
traps, poison, he is now and always: "O'er all 
the ills of life victorious." I do not claim that 
he is to be compared to a "Yellow prim-rose on 
the river's brink" so far as a poetic uplift goes, 
but I do aver that in my heart he has stirred: 
"Thoughts that do lie too deep for words." Oh! 
you don't like his shrill unmusical ear-splitting 
squawk. I do not blame you very much, but I 
question if I ever heard it just as you have. It's 
the noise of the children of that neighbor whom 
you do not like that is especially offensive; the 
noise of your own children may sound like music. 
There is a difference. Then we must reckon with 
individual taste. Don't misunderstand me; I'm 
not putting my friend Yorick up as a musical 
prodigy, far from it. As a singer he is in the class 



180 What Birds Have Done With Me 

with the Pea-cock and they may have attended the 
same singing school. Nevertheless, I'd rather 
listen to forty Jays than one Hawaiian Band. 

Years and years ago, when I was an officer in 
the Penitentiary of Wisconsin, there was a Jay 
there, the prisoner of a prisoner and in spite of 
his gloomy surroundings he was a gay rollicking 
fellow, with more pranks and whimsies than a 
Parrot or a Monkey. It was a matter of frequent 
comment that he was such a favorite with the in- 
mates of the cell-house where he was kept and it 
was generally understood that when prisoners 
hurled curses at him, they were compliments in 
disguise, for they all recognized that his shrill 
squawk had power to bring to them, even through 
barred windows, the great out of doors. 

I never listen to a passionate denunciation of 
the Jay, generally expressed by a string of oppro- 
brious epithets, a few laps longer than the moral 
law, without being reminded of the quarrel be- 
tween a couple of negro boys; when one had 
hurled at the other every obnoxious term he could 
think of, the one assailed quietly remarked, "All 
you say I am, you is." You think the Jay a 
thief and a robber, well he returns your sentiment 
plus a distrust of you, in all your ways, unequalled 
by anything in the bird kingdom. Don't be de- 
ceived by the fact that he is not wild, that is ex- 
plained by the further fact that he is not afraid 



Jays and Crows 181 

of you and though he builds his nest near your 
home, he never relaxes his belief that you will do 
him a mischief if you get a chance. Try to feed 
him and you will see just how much he believes 
in your benevolence. He will swoop down and 
snatch some of the offered food, but it is frankly 
the act of one robber robbing another robber and 
not the act of a friend receiving a gift from an- 
other friend. 

It was a proud day in my life when after a thou- 
sand failures a Jay allowed me to give him some- 
thing. I well remember how I smiled all over 
and asked him to come around and drink tea with 
me that evening. He excused himself, but we got 
to be real chums and our relations were cordial 
if not exactly intimate. What an interesting vaga- 
bond he was. My old Collie dog, Lobo, was old 
and stricken in years and the dinner given him 
was often beyond his capacity and he would lie 
down in the sun outside the kitchen door and 
straightway go to sleep on guard, for which of 
course, according to military law, he should have 
been shot at sunrise, but he was not stood up 
against a wall and so Yorick, not wanting him to 
go scot free for such a lapse from the obvious 
line of duty, took the occasion to rob him of the 
remainder of the badly guarded dinner. After 
which he would perch himself on a nearby stair- 
way, just out of the sleeper's reach and proceed 



1 82 What Birds Have Done With Me 

to whistle till the foolish old dog waking out of 
sleep would charge the robber whose spirit of mis- 
chief was beyond question. 

None of his bird neighbors either fear or dis- 
like the Jay and his veracity is never questioned. 
He most fittingly is dressed in blue for he is the 
real police-man of the bird kingdom and is always 
on his job. Just let an owl, making a night of it, 
resolve that he won't go home till the day after 
and he can't hide himself on the lawn so the Jay 
will not spy him out and call all the race of birds 
to mobilize against a common Hun, and Chateau 
Thierry, in a small way is reenacted under the 
leadership of a sure enough American general. 
Take your gun and dog and start to the woods 
for a day's hunt and a certain blue-coated guard- 
ian of the forests gets there ahead of you and 
goes slipping through the tree-tops, warning all 
wood folk of the coming of man, the most de- 
structive of all animals. 

Gentlemen of the Jury, I put this up to you to 
pass upon the probability of a real criminal en- 
joying the confidence and respect of his neighbors, 
having a reputation for veracity never questioned 
and a reputation, among those who know him best, 
as something of a philanthropist in rendering help 
to the needy. On the question of nest robbing, I 
might assure you that I have known a Jay and a 
Robin to bring up their broods at the same time, in 



Jays and Crows 183 

the same tree and the tree not a large one at 
that; but according to the old saying that one 
blue-bird does not make Spring, so a single in- 
stance is far from being conclusive in the establish- 
ment of any allegation. 

Now if the court please, I will introduce here, 
marked Exhibit A, a scientific examination of 
the stomachs of two hundred and ninety-two Jays, 
killed in the breeding season, in almost every state 
in the Union, the work being under the direction 
of the Biological Survey in Washington. The 
results are certainly astonishing and probably to 
no one more than the amateurish investigators 
and hear-say mongers bringing this action. Out 
of the whole number of investigations made it 
was found that only five could have been guilty 
of anything like nest robbing. Three contained 
fragments of shell; one undoubtedly, that of a 
smaller bird; another stomach had a fragment of 
shell that might or might not have been that of 
a domestic fowl, and the third seemed to be a 
fragment of the shell of a grouse. Two stomachs 
contained remains of birds. One the undoubted 
fragment of the body of a small bird recently 
hatched ; the other stomach had in it the feet and 
claws of a fully-mature bird, variety unknown. 

Now Gentlemen of the Jury, let us go back and 
weigh and estimate this evidence of guilt, and I 
think we will find that it will furnish precious little 



1 84 What Birds Have Done With Me 

comfort to the plaintiffs bringing this case. With 
regard to the shells found in the stomachs, in all 
fairness the one that resembled the shell of a 
hen's egg should be excluded as it is a well-known 
fact that such a fragment is often thrown out 
from back doors, where Jays come to look for 
scraps, especially before people are up in the 
morning. In one of the two remaining cases the 
shell was thought to be that of a grouse, found 
late in August, long after their nesting season. 
No evidence of nest robbing in that find. The 
third was the shell of a song bird, but in the 
breeding season all birds drop eggs on the ground 
every where and it is to be questioned if it had 
ever been in a nest. With regard to the frag- 
ments of birds found in the stomach, one was a 
part of a nestling, but there is no proof that it was 
either killed or taken from a nest by my client, 
for even people who have next to no knowledge of 
birds or bird life, know that young birds some- 
times die in the nest from various causes and the 
first thing that the mother would be likely to do 
would be to throw it out of the nest, where any- 
thing might pick it up, although no nest robber. 

With regard to the last and final examination, 
it furnishes no proof of wrong-doing upon the 
part of a Jay, for it is clearly evidence of the 
wrong-doing of a cat, the fragments clearly be- 
ing the remains of a cat's supper. Gentlemen of 



Jays and Crows 185 

the jury, the analysis of this evidence spells ac- 
quittal for my client. Only two out of two hun- 
dred and ninety-two who could by any stretch of 
circumstantial evidence have been guilty of nest 
robbing, as charged. Here we rest our case; sim- 
ply warning you that anything brought forward 
by the plaintiffs will surely turn out to be incom- 
petent, irrelevant and immaterial, and not evi- 
dence. 

Having now established the fact, as I think, 
that my friend Yorick is true blue, I take up the 
case of his cousin, the Crow, with confidence and 
high hopes of securing justice for a worthy citizen. 

If the court please, this second defendant in 
the general indictment found against Jays and 
Crows, will have to be defended along lines al- 
ready brought forward in the defence of the Jay, 
and I herewith demand the discharge of my client 
on the ground that no State can have jurisdiction 
in the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of a 
bird that is not, so to speak, the citizen of a 
State but the ward of the Nation. As my motion 
is refused, Your Honor, we may as well proceed 
to trial. Again I wish to be sworn and put upon 
the stand as the first witness. 

Gentlemen of the Jury, is it not an astonishing 
fact that good citizens who have conscientious 
scruples against painting the devil blacker than he 
really is have no scruples, conscientious or other- 



1 86 What Birds Have Done With Me 

wise, against painting my client blacker than he 
is, and even blacker than the devil. 

I honestly cannot tell just when and where it 
was that I met my first Crow; I am, however 
quite certain that it was not at a conservatory 
of music and it might have been at the obsequies 
of man's noble friend, the horse. Perhaps the 
way he sticks around after what has been done to 
exterminate him may be traced to this same habit 
of getting, so to speak, the first chance at the 
glue pot. Being an undertaker's apprentice, it 
is fitting that he should wear black and eschew 
frivolity of all kinds; a sad bird, indeed, if sad- 
ness is to be accentuated by a customary suit of 
solemn black. Strongly social by nature, some 
think he has a language, and if that is so, per 
adventure he gossips or talks shop. 

Leaving the domain of conjecture and coming 
into that of fact, it may be averred that no other 
bird has been the victim of so much prejudice, 
perjury and piffle. Pre-judgment is the forming 
of an opinion before you are in possession of the 
facts in the case and such an opinion once adopted 
is frequently held with the utmost tenacity when 
facts are presented calculated to overthrow your 
pre-judgment. Sentiment, dislike, love, hatred, 
rarely have a foundation of fact and you can do 
no more to change them by pelting them with facts 
than you could drive away a fog by throwing 



Jays and Crows 187 

stones at it. The Jay and the Crow are hated 
because they are believed to be bad birds; show 
them to be good members of the bird kingdom 
and many people will not change their dislike of 
them an iota. 

"I do not like you Dr. Fell, 

The reason why I cannot tell, 
This single fact I know full well, 
I do not like you Dr. Fell." 

Just as the mind crowds the unknown with fool- 
ish superstitions, so we endow what we dislike 
with every detestable quality that the imagination 
can conjure up and this is the human quality that 
has conceived of total depravity as a condition 
not uncommon. We use the Crow as a unit of 
measure in estimating conditions of blackness, and 
as black as a Crow is superlative. He is a bird 
belonging to the realm of uncreated night, mys- 
terious, probably devilish. This belief was clearly 
in the mind of Edgar Allan Poe, when he wrote of 
the Raven, the Crow's first cousin : "And his eyes 
have all the seeming of a demon that is dream- 
ing." Now in spite of all this the Crow is not 
as black as painted, and there are even white 
Crows. 

What lies have been told about him, by people 
who never meant to lie, and the lie in combina- 
tion with printer's ink has made a fine mechanical 
mixture for the dissemination of falsehood. A 



1 88 What Birds Have Done With Me 

dear, old grandmother, with three grandsons over 
in France helping make the world safe for Democ- 
racy, and a woman who would not intentionally 
misrepresent, told and it got mixed with printer's 
ink, too, that she saw a wicked, black Crow steal 
and carry away a clutch of fifteen hen's eggs. It 
was not stated just how he carried the eggs, so 
you are at liberty to make a guess whether it was 
with claws or in his bill. 

Again, a very honorable citizen, an official 
member in a rural church, stated that he saw, and 
this got mixed with printer's ink, too, a wicked 
black Crow — as black as ever Crows can be — 
carry away a whole brood of baby chicks, one by 
one, in his talons. And taking the public into 
his confidence, he lapses into a reminiscence of a 
barn-building that he carried on for a brother- 
in-law, way back in the early settlement of Wis- 
consin, and having to walk through a woods to 
get to his work, carried his gun and without loss 
of time kept his family table supplied with Grouse. 
These birds, according to the statement, were so 
plentiful and tame that he sometimes got a mess 
on a rainy day shooting from the windows of the 
barn. At the close of his valuable contribution 
to natural history, he solemnly avers that since 
that time the Grouse have been practically exter- 
minated by the nest-robbing Crow, possibly a 
Crow with talons. 



Jays and Crows 189 

To my certain knowledge a Grouse had her 
nest on the ground, in part of an old tree-top 
blown from a giant white-oak and in that oak a 
Crow had her nest and the bad nest-robbing Crow 
never molests the eggs or callow young of her 
nearby neighbor. And I have a hen-house on the 
edge of a big woods where Crows have nested for 
the last quarter of a century, but to the best of 
my knowledge and belief, no egg or young chicken 
has ever been disturbed. As a matter of fact, 
no Crow could possibly carry away a hen's egg, 
and they have no talons. So far as I know they 
prefer their game and meat a little high. The 
Crow being a bird of uncanny intelligence, super- 
natural cunning, seeing and hearing everything 
going on in his neighborhood; no nest could be hid- 
den and none would escape if he made a business 
of robbing them. According to the Scotch verdict, 
the charge against him is: "Not proven." 

Now the farmers' charge against him is not as 
a nest robber, so much as a corn puller; pulling 
the young corn when it first comes up. It would 
be folly to allow my client to plead not guilty to 
this charge, for it happens to be true. In certain 
localities and under certain conditions, the Crow 
develops an appetite for the well-soaked, soft and 
mushy germinating kernel, and damages the com- 
ing crop. Some years he pulls no corn, and in 
some States he is a pest and not in others, and the 



190 What Birds Have Done With Me 

damage he does is insignificant compared to his 
destruction of the June Beetle, the parent of the 
frightfully destructive White Grub. The Crow 
may take a few hills, but the Grub will take the 
entire field. There is something almost ridicu- 
lous in the devices advocated to trap the June 
Beetle ; flickering lights and tubs filled with water 
and kerosene, the light to attract, the mixture to 
drown, and the great Agricultural Schools advo- 
cating the "Light Water Trap," does not seem 
to have thought of giving the Crow, the Beetle's 
natural enemy, a chance. Later on we may be 
told to go after the June Bug with machine guns, 
bombing air-planes and gas shells, and at the same 
time continue the bounty on Crows. Piffle, 
wretched piffle. 

Serious consequences follow tampering with 
Nature's balance. Men, to preserve the teem- 
ing finny tribes that abounded in the four great 
rivers that empty their waters into Mississippi 
Sound at Biloxi, went ahead and killed the Alli- 
gators that also abounded, and the result was 
the vast multiplication of the Alligator Gar-fish, 
upon which the Alligator fed in such numbers that 
it speedily destroyed most of the game fish. 

Hawks, Owls, Jays and Crows have been 
slaughtered, things useful and beneficial in the 
scheme of Nature to the great detriment of grow- 
ing crops for the removal of their natural enemies 



Jays and Crows 191 

allowed pests and vermin to multiply and the bal- 
ance of Nature has been disturbed. A lady said 
to me the other day, half petulantly, "If you 
seriously defend Jays and Crows I would not be 
surprised to hear you demand protection for 
Snakes and Skunks." I made answer, "I am sur- 
prised that you have not heard that I have been 
demanding protection for both, for more than 
twenty years." 

Gentlemen of the Jury, that farmer is only once 
removed from a fool who demands physical 
beauty and the ability to either sing or whistle 
from everyone in his employ. If he does his 
work and does it well, he should be protected and 
reasonably remunerated, quite independent of 
how he strikes our fancy. The public press, the 
rostrum, the pulpit, and a great commission, and 
even blank walls, have been shouting to us for 
months that food will win the war. The les- 
son is obvious; everyone was to unite in conserv- 
ing it, why not allow the bird to keep it from the 
destruction of swarming myriads of Hun insects 
and rodents. Hunger is a monster, disregarding 
every law, it can make a cannibal out of the flower 
of our highest civilization, and neither Jay nor 
Crow nor human creature is to be punished for 
what they are driven to by starvation. 

Gentlemen of the Jury, I demand acquittal for 
the Crow as I did for the Jay; on the ground that 



192 What Birds Have Done With Me 

there was no cause for action. And with this 
anecdote I rest my case. Many years ago, in a 
country church, a tame Crow flew into the build- 
ing and, lighting on the sounding board of a 
half century ago, interrupted the evening revival 
by croaking out from the gloom that concealed 
him from all eyes, when the good man was mak- 
ing the opening prayer: "Damn you," and again, 
"Damn you," and so he kept it up till human 
nature could not stand it and, seized with super- 
stitious fear, the Reverend man and the entire con- 
gregation fled, with the exception of one old 
woman, who recognized that it was a tame crow 
talking. And when he kept on with his maledic- 
tions after the two were alone, she with some 
natural ire, shook her finger in the direction of 
the voice and said, "See here, Billy, you hain't 
got no occasion to damn me, for I don't belong 
to this church no how." 

Whether I win or lose, I some way feel that 
I have at least earned the right of exemption 
from the malediction of a tame Crow, for I do 
not belong "no how" to that vast company of 
superstitious, uninformed, avaricious tillers of the 
soil who seek his life, to take it away. 



CHAPTER XVI 

birds' courtship and marriage 

Some cynic has said that matrimony among up- 
to-date people is a necessary preliminary to ali- 
mony. This cannot be true of our bird neigh- 
bors, but they have their preliminaries also, and 
some of . them more or less exciting and even 
weird. 

Generally speaking, we know so little of birds 
that it may seem a good deal like presumption to 
write of their personal and most intimate rela- 
tions. Still we know more of the courtship of 
some birds than that of the soldier and his girl 
clinging together on the street, and more of their 
marital woes than we know of the unhappy tri- 
angles of the divorce courts. Man — "the roof 
and crown of things" — a little lower than the 
angels, stuff and nonsense, is not to be compared, 
in devotion and constancy, with his bird neighbors. 
The stones that have been thrown at birds, since 
time began, had better have been thrown at man 
if he, in his smug superiority, were capable of tak- 
ing a rebuke. 

l 93 



194 What Birds Have Done With Me 

The human race today is something turned out 
of a melting pot, cannibal and patrician, with all 
grades between producing mongrel tribes cover- 
ing the earth. The bird, free to follow its own 
nature, produces neither hybrids nor mongrels. 
Think of it, a thousand ducks migrating together, 
nesting together, and never a cross-bred bird; 
birds are always and everywhere, true to species. 
Do you begin to feel the rebuke of it? Is their 
conduct or man's the most astonishing? 

A few years ago I closed the bathing season 
at Green Lake by accidentally going into the water 
in a successful effort to get a wild duck out alive 
that was being frozen into the ice, being unable 
to fly owing to a broken wing. He was taken 
home and put in a pen of Pekin ducks, eleven 
females and one drake, and this drake was acci- 
dentally killed by a playful colt, when the flock 
crawled under the fence into the horse yard. This 
left Mr. Green-headed Mallard in sole possession 
of a snug little harem of his own. Talk of peas 
in a pod, those white ducks looked exactly alike 
and yet only one appealed to the little stranger 
from the wild. The courtship is a sealed book, 
or was it not made into a book as is so common; 
about the only thing I am certain of is that it 
was carried on late at night, which may be the 
only thing certainly human about it. 

We first became sure of their marriage, seeing 



Birds' Courtship and Marriage 195 

them together in the opaline light of an April 
dawn. To quote from Ella Wheeler Wilcox's 
"Birth of the Opal" perhaps: "The dying day- 
was their priest." "For this cause," says the old 
marriage service, "a man shall leave his father 
and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and 
they shall be one flesh." Now this is as true of 
ducks as of humans, and as. true of Mrs. Hen as 
of Mr. Drake. In the case in hand, she did the 
cleaving; leaving her family and following her 
uncivilized husband to a nearby island, where she 
performed the duties of wife and missionary to 
the heathen, at one and the same time. 

During the long-drawn-out period of incuba- 
tion her family were more or less devoted, mak- 
ing frequent calls when they were swimming by, 
and who knows, aunts and cousins and even sis- 
ters may have asked the family's new member to 
take a little swim with them, but he never did. He 
surely looked lonesome as he swam back and forth 
in the lagoon near the nest and I am certain he 
was; and my six-year-old granddaughter dubbed 
him Dr. Mally because he did so much quacking. 
How "Mally" caught the spirit of our civiliza- 
tion, heaven only knows. I am dealing in facts, 
not psychology, and it is a fact that the very next 
year he had five white wives and two gray ones, 
and his name should have been changed to Lot. 

The aimless Puckyan is a stream so crooked 



196 What Birds Have Done With Me 

that it has been told that an explorer seeking its 
outlet, it never had an inlet, followed its winding 
course through more S's than are in the name of 
the State of Mississippi; and tied up his boat and 
stayed all night at a farmhouse on a bend, and 
after paddling all the next day, tied up his boat 
and stayed the next night at the same house, 
never having gotten out of sight of it. The lan- 
guid little river, a river that never grew up, mean- 
ders somewhere in the "Big Marsh." The owner 
of the house at the bend, Mr. Wiselander, came 
back from the Big Marsh one late September 
afternoon with a high load of hay and a baby 
Sand-Hill Crane, the longest-legged bird that ever 
wet its ankles in the deep places of the Puckyan. 
When he first saw it he got a notion that it wanted 
to catch a ride and there was no waiting for a 
second invitation to come along and take pot luck 
at the farmhouse, not, however, the usual pot 
luck given birds. This strangely tame creature 
from the wild was soon at home at the farm and 
spent its time taking bird's-eye views of terrestrial 
things. How it spent the winter looking down 
on the woolly creatures that some way got their 
noses into a big barn that had been assigned to 
a star boarder, are matters to be passed over in 
well-bred silence. Neither have I time to tell of 
his possession of a prudent mind, like Mrs. John 
Gilpin, a mind that would not allow the daughter 



Birds' Courtship and Marriage 197 

of the house to bury perfectly good tulip bulbs, 
and forced him to resurrect the same and store 
them away for future use. 

Jumping many attractive little hurdles, so to 
speak, just turn your opera glasses upon Mr. S. 
Hill Crane and myself as in the soft Spring 
weather we turn our unequal steps in the direc- 
tion of the Big Marsh, he, in pursuit of experience 
and I, in the pursuit of knowledge. We both got 
what we went for; he got a wife and I, knowledge 
of what it means to be best man at a high-up 
wedding. It was both an old and a new cam- 
paign, but no listening post was needed; you could 
not even escape the soft nothings he whispered 
to the South wind before she paused in her cloud, 
as though saying to herself, "Why not a little 
home of my own close to the gushing heart of the 
Big Marsh?" 

Not all lunatics are lovers, but all lovers are 
lunatics, and the crazy things that fool bird did 
I am afraid to tell for I am not sure whether I 
saw things or dreamed them. It's easier to think 
that I really got what I am about to tell from 
"Alice in Wonderland" than from the Big Marsh, 
where my father used to buy standing grass for 
fifty cents an acre, when I was a boy. A good 
wife always comes at your call and as she came 
at his from the first, I knew what kind of a wife 
she was going to be. He had no claim check upon 



198 What Birds Have Done With Me 

her when she first put in an appearance, while she 
had a stop-over and was just looking around a 
little. On close inspection the Big Marsh was a 
trifle flatter than she had supposed, and she 
preened her left wing and waved her right one as 
though for immediate flight. It was now or never. 
Doubtless you are saying he will show her what 
a swift flyer he is, how fast he can run, how many 
frogs he can catch in an eight-hour day; perish 
the thought. 

The crazy jumping-jack knows the way to the 
feminine heart, the battle is not to the strong, nor 
the race to the swift, any more certainly than is 
the dance, the last argument of lovers. Ghost of 
a cotillion of wooden-horses, minuet of a Hippo- 
potamus, five-step waltz of a Giraffe and Kanga- 
roo; S. Hill Crane has you all beaten to a frazzle. 
However, nothing succeeds like success, and those 
graceful gyrations of his do the business, and 
according to the long-established usage of the con- 
ventional novel, I should merely add: and they 
married and lived happily ever afterward, but I 
want to say that he who went forth in the Spring 
alone, returned in the Fall with joy, bringing a 
wife and heir with him. 

Life is such a tangled skein, the bitter and sweet 
co-mingled, before spring the silly sheep had tram- 
pled the life out of his wife, and the winter wind 
slammed a door, breaking the neck of his son. 



Birds* Courtship and Marriage 199 

Lonely is the Big Marsh today; the few passing 
Cranes have discarded it as an zero-station, and 
the call of their old enemy is fading from the 
subconsciousness of the younger generation of 
frogs; if heard close at hand I do not believe one 
would dive to cover. All this occurred more than 
a quarter of a century ago and Mr. S. Hill Crane 
has moved to town with the family with which 
he has lived so long, and spends his last days 
looking down on chickens and in the Spring, utter- 
ing soft nothings to the South wind, that has, also, 
seemingly abandoned her wireless station on the 
Big Marsh. 

When we went into the wilderness to live in a 
log house; that house was only a mile from the 
village of Dartford, but between our house and 
the little village was Mills' Swamp, and through 
it the road was made by placing little logs side by 
side, and then putting brush over the logs and 
dirt over both. The track was not more than a 
dozen feet wide and neither side was fenced, but 
old Mills was going to fence his side and had piles 
of rails along, once in such a distance, and for 
years neglected to build a fence. Why should 
he, when other people only fenced their cultivated 
land? There was not another house between our 
house and the east side of the village, and Jerry 
Norton had no difficulty in making a certain seven- 
year-old boy believe that Mills' Swamp had been 



200 What Birds Have Done With Me 

set aside for Hell's Kitchen, as soon as they got 
it drained. I suppose the point he was making 
was that they never could drain it and they never 
have up to date. 

Those stranger days when Indians were seen 
daily gliding along the trail that we called a 
road, and coming out of the marsh with strings 
of dead pigeons; its visible terrors were enough 
to raise goose-pimples on a young frontier tender- 
foot, but it really was the unseen, lurking hide- 
ousness of the swamp under the curtain of night, 
all manner of unearthly noises in the sky that 
settled down to taste the bubbling hell broth that 
was being cooked by a million flickering lights, 
that froze a fellow's blood. 

Dr. Barnes coming along this road to see my 
brother Ted, who was sick, had left his tired horse 
at home and was just opposite the fifth rail pile 
when from the next rail pile, a mighty Mountain 
Lion sprang into the road with a raucous screech 
that for an instant silenced every other noise in 
the wilderness, except the beating of the doctor's 
heart. The stars were out, but there was no 
moon and the most obvious things about the at- 
tacking beast were its eyes and tail; the tail in 
constant motion as the big cat lashed its sides 
and the green eyes emitting sparks of fire. The 
doctor thought at first that there were about fifty 
feet between them, but as the night prowler ad- 



Birds' Courtship and Marriage 20I 

vanced, the man with the saddle-bags on his arm, 
backed away in the direction of the village, having 
on hand a progressive case whose course could 
not be checked by the kind of pills he carried. 
The agitated gentleman was trying to over-awe it 
by the gleam of his brown eyes into its two points 
of flame, and perhaps he succeeded to some slight 
extent, but the close proximity of the village, 
swarming with dogs, was most likely the reason 
why a good hunter went to bed without a late 
supper. The doctor made his professional call 
later, having exchanged his saddle-bags (for a 
double-barrelled shotgun loaded with buckshot, 
and brought with him, as further body-guard, Bill 
Marshall and Charley Cody, each armed with a 
long rifle, muzzle-loaders. 

The township hunt organized and carried on 
with vigor, saw many traces of this undesired 
visitor from regions to the north, but the beast 
eluded all pursuit. But this is another story. 
They sent me to the doctor's boarding place that 
he also used as an office, for some medicine for 
Ted, now nearly well, that would be found wait- 
ing my coming. As hero of the Mountain Lion 
story, the doctor's time had been a good bit 
broken in on and he had forgotten to put it up. 
His landlady was sure he would be right back 
and advised me to wait. I waited and waited, 
and waited, and it was dark when he got back. 



202 What Birds Have Done With Me 

It was really outrageous to have allowed a 
little fellow to go through that marsh so soon 
after that unsuccessful Mountain Lion hunt, but 
there is this to be said, that the big scare made 
many others, afterward encountered, seem com- 
paratively trifling. It was doubtless a Mountain 
Lion, but they called it a Panther, and it took 
up my trail the moment I got out in the night 
alone. I thought I was giving him a good run 
for his money, as the saying goes, but he some 
way outran me and when I got to the fifth pile 
of rails, he rushed from the sixth pile, his old 
lurking place, and sprang upon me. Undoubt- 
edly a person may be paralyzed with fear, and I 
must have been, for I made no attempt to escape. 
The impact of the creature's body knocked me 
over, and the creature began licking my face, 
naturally enough as it was our big dog that had 
come to meet me. That I did not choke him to 
death through pure joy, is little short of a miracle, 
but strangely enough I was more afraid of the 
sure-enough Panther than I had ever been. 

This digression is simply to establish the fact 
that bird courtship may be of so fascinating a 
character as to actually overcome the most deadly 
fear. 

A booming noise, unlike anything else on earth, 
starting at the earth and seemingly going around 
in a circle, up, up in the sky, and when it had 



Birds' Courtship and Marriage 203 

vanished, the same thing coming nearer and nearer 
and dropping in the grass at your feet in the late 
twilight, or early dawn, when sight and fancy 
are one and the same thing. Before I was ten 
years of age I had followed this gripping mystery 
all over that swamp with a Panther hidden behind 
every tree, and a convention of them assembling 
in every thicket. I just could not give it up if I 
died for it. A ditch through Mills' Swamp emp- 
tied into the Puckyan, right opposite "the deep 
hole," which everyone knew was the very best 
place to catch chubs for pickerel bait. Freshets 
from the melting of deep snows in the spring, 
and occasional heavy rains in summer brought 
floods of muddy water into the sluggish river and 
along the south side, under the shadow of ven- 
erable elms ; a considerable mud bank was formed 
and this mud bank was, from time to time, per- 
forated by holes as big as a lead pencil, a kind 
of a Brobdingnagian piece of honey-comb with no 
suggestion of honey. It was a crazy trestle-board 
upon which the outline of no theory could be 
erected. 

It was likely early in May or late April, on 
the eve of a fishing Saturday that I fished the 
deep hole for chubs with which to catch the king 
of great Northern Pike out of Green Lake, and 
if not actually the king, I at least, hoped for the 
heir-apparent. I think it rained and I did not 



204 IV hat Birds Have Done With Me 

go fishing the next day, but that chub fishing I 
have gone back to oftener in memory than any 
other fishing I ever did, and still rank it as a 
great event in my life. The mystery that I had 
pursued so long and so far, suddenly staged itself 
along the inner edge of the mud-flat, under the 
outer shadow of great trees and just at the point 
where twilight and night blended and became 
one. I thought them snipe and had seen them 
across the river pursuing each other while I fought 
mosquitoes and caught bait. I was sole audience, 
sole press reporter, at a Woodcocks' Gretna 
Green without knowing how privileged a charac- 
ter I was. It was as novel a kind of "Seven Up" 
as any that could have been played out for Alice 
when seeing things in Fairyland. Why seven up? 
For the very excellent reason that going and com- 
ing, there were just that number at one time in 
the air. What an astounding mode of courtship 
— an aerial dance. The male bird doing all the 
dancing; making unearthly booming sounds and 
spinning around in the air as he climbs invisible 
stairways till he hears the angels sing, then the 
return trip, falling at her feet, but quite done up 
till the next time. 

It's not only mysterious, it's inexplicable, but 
it does the trick and is presumably the surest way 
to ensnare the affection of Miss Henrietta Wood- 
cock. This is billing and cooing with a long dash 



Birds' Courtship and Marriage 205 

between each bill and coo. If the little god of 
love who presides over human courtship and mar- 
riage, also, follows the courtship of a Woodcock 
that may explain why we see him pictured with so 
few clothes — stripped for a race. An old sailor 
here in Biloxi when asked if he knew what caused 
the tide, admitted that he did, and proceeded to 
explain it: "You know," said he, "when a feller 
turns over in bed he gets there quite a bit ahead 
of the covers that come a-rolling and a-swashing 
along after him, and when the world turns over 
in the ocean, the waves come a-rolling and a-swash- 
ing along some ways behind. You can explain 
everything if you are careful to study out the 
reasons." He is not here now and it has always 
been a matter of regret that I never asked him to 
elucidate the seeming mystery of the Woodcock's 
courtship. 

Male birds are the greatest lovers in the world, 
always excepting Wilson's Phalarope. Though 
he belongs to Mr. Wilson, I greatly suspect him 
of being secretly opposed to the League of Na- 
tions, for he is publicly opposed to the holy bonds 
of matrimony, and is on the wrong side of most 
things — miserable little no-account snipe. He is 
no Lord of creation. Good Lord! his wife has 
to do all the courting and threaten him with a 
breach of promise case before she can force him 
to marry her and he just hates her because she is 



206 What Birds Have Done With Me 

bigger and stronger and better looking than he is. 
Could any wife respect such a husband? You 
know she could not, and I, for one, think she 
serves him just right when she leaves him to in- 
cubate the eggs and rear the family, without help 
from her. Cutting all domestic matters she 
devotes herself to civic affairs and is a really 
respected suffragette. This Miss Nancy, old hen, 
Bridget, Child's Nurse, he, Phalarope, is the 
mean little exception to a sex that has made woo- 
ing a profession and song and love, synonymous. 



CHAPTER XVII 

A LAST YEAR'S BIRD'S NEST 

This is a proverbial type of emptiness, but 
Nature abhors a vacuum and emptiness is speed- 
ily filled with things visible or invisible. At a 
first glance, this dilapidated, weather-worn old 
nest seems as bare as old Mother Hubbard's cup- 
board, but before you can look twice, a ray from 
Aladdin's Lamp has gilded and beautified and 
crowds its emptiness with teeming life. 

Lo ! we are in the presence of a work of art, 
not made with hands, and of a model to be seen 
"through the latticed windows of the grove," 
when Time was young. Yes, bird-craft is greater 
than hand-craft, for no human creature, using his 
hands and mouth alone could equal the wonder 
of this old nest. This Master-Builder could have 
never been taught Geometry, but he, nevertheless, 
never fails to produce a perfect circle in the archi- 
tecture of a nest whose model is unchanging from 
age to age and whose craftsmen produce nothing 
that falls short of perfection. 

There is magic here. Aladdin's Lamp is so 
207 



2o8 What Birds Have Done With Me 

flooding the old nest with light, unapproachable, 
that one instinctively begins to fumble for his 
shoe-laces. We have before us a microcosm, 
in this shallow cavity, life and melody had their 
birth, pray God, the life may be unending and the 
melody as eternal as Time. An empty nest? — 
far from it. Here the miracle of Mother-Love 
has reflected the visible presence of the Divine 
Creator of something so holy that in its presence, 
Art and Song fall down powerless and all speech 
becomes incoherent mutterings. 

I hold the crumbling nest in my hand and try 
to visualize a form or forms that the depths of 
space have swallowed up, try to follow the waves 
of melody that may flow on for twice ten thou- 
sand years and my vanished singers, indeed, be- 
come "Troubadours and Ballad singers on the 
streets of Heaven." Much has gone from the 
nest and much remains. A nest is a type of home 
and the perfect home, also, has its relation to 
Past and Future, Life and Gladness, and there is 
nothing else of greater significance, or more uni- 
versal attractiveness in this present evil world. 

How well I remember my first nest which, so 
to speak, I held in co-partnership with the parent 
birds — a pair of Robins. It was located on a 
corner of a Virginia rail fence, along a lane where 
I drove cows every day on my father's farm in 
Wisconsin. I had never seen a nest — it was my 



A Last Year's Bird's Nest 209 

first year in the country and I am not even sure 
that I had ever heard of one. When I first saw 
the Robins flying about with grass and straw in 
their mouths, I pondered upon it but certainly 
did not arrive at the right explanation, for, on 
recovering from having been thrown from the 
back of an unbroken colt, I resumed my usual duty 
as a cow-herd, I suddenly saw the nest, — not as 
high as my head and containing four wonderfully 
blue eggs — Robin's egg blue — there is no other 
color just like it. I afterward saw some of the 
wonders of architecture that man has erected on 
this earth, I saw diamonds and other precious 
stones, confronted many of the wonders of Crea- 
tion, but nothing ever astounded, awed, enthralled 
me like that first nest with its sky-blue eggs. It 
has been said that every circus is but a duplica- 
tion of our first circus and so every other nest 
among the thousands I have seen has but in a 
greater or less degree, reflected the wonder of 
that first nest — a house not made with hands. 
Wood-peckers building their nests in the very 
heart of oaks, turning bill and head into chisel 
and hammer and beating carpenters at their own 
kind of work, impressed me greatly, but some 
way it did not seem quite so wonderful as the 
perfectly round nest made of grass and mud, 
with its blue eggs under the blue sky. I did not 
believe the man who first told me of the Bal- 



210 What Birds Have Done With Me 

timore Oriole's nest; a woven bottle, hitched to 
the tip-top branch of a tall tree, where it was 
swung by the winds as no boat was ever rocked 
by the waves. But it was all true, plus the 
witchery of always finding it complete and never 
in process of construction. I think I was most 
shocked and sorry for a little warbler, who, so 
to speak, always has to carry its nest with it 
and that nest a Dutch oven. No wonder he 
walks in the most dignified manner, instead of 
hopping, — what else can you expect of an "Oven- 
Bird"? The name was given on account of the 
size and shape of the nest that is built on the 
ground. 

From the Fish-hawk's nest, built year after 
year, in the same tree, one nest upon another, till 
you see what looks like a cartload of sticks, down 
to no nest at all ; the eggs deposited on the ground 
or a flat rock, there are all gradations. So there 
are all sizes of eggs; from the Ostrich, as big as 
your head, down to that of the Humming-bird 
not bigger than a pea. When Jerry Norton, the 
village liar, told me of birds' eggs bigger than 
my head, I thought he was lying; when he told 
me that some bald-headed men had a sun-stroke 
on a desert and as they lay unconscious, some 
Ostriches came along and thinking the bald heads 
their own eggs, sat on them and hatched out bal- 
let-girls, I knew he was. He must have told the 



A Last Year's Bird's Nest 211 

same story to Francis Wilson and it looks as 
though he believed it, for he has been telling it off 
and on ever since. 

That birds have unchanging types of nests, 
built in about the same general locations from 
year to year, has long been established beyond 
question. In fact, so generally accepted is the 
type and the location that at a first glance we 
might jump to the mistaken conclusion that both 
are beyond change. There are few rules having 
an invariable sequence and the general rule of 
the nesting habits of birds is not an exception. 
Their rule is changed, some in only a slight degree, 
others radically. The Swallows have departed 
most widely in this respect. The Barn-Swallows, 
with their long row of nests beneath the eaves, 
have made certainly great departure from the 
habits of their ancestors, but not greater than 
the Purple-Martin, from a hole in a tree to his 
present man-made apartment house. 

Perhaps strangest of all is the Swift in the 
chimney, — the Chimney Swift, braving smoke and 
fire and gloom profound, not to mention an odor 
of creosote next to a Hun's gas shell. Great 
numbers of young must be smothered and burned, 
but still they persist, doubtless for reasons as 
mysterious as their place of winter sojourn, which 
is not known. The Night-Hawk, also, made a 
stupendous change when it changed from the 



212 What Birds Have Done With Me 

bosom of Mother Nature to the flat roof of a 
city block, where it is not infrequently found 
nesting. 

The Mourning Dove is one of the most in- 
artistic and slovenly of nest builders, often mak- 
ing so shallow and poorly-constructed a nest that 
a sudden movement from fright will cause her to 
knock out of the nest one or both of her eggs. 
What is true of the Mourning Dove was equally 
true of the Passenger Pigeon and I recall the 
same kind of accident to a Pigeon nest that I was 
watching, many years ago; first, one egg and, a 
few days afterward, the second were knocked out 
and broken by the mother bird. That various 
birds have ideas of adornment and ornamentation 
is beyond question. I saw a Robin's nest, this last 
season built in a passage-way beside lattice work 
and on the side opposite of the lattice work, 
streamers of heavy cord had been attached to 
the nest and hung down three and four feet. How 
else are we to explain the sluffed snake-skin that 
the Great Fly-Catcher twists around its nest? 
Bright pieces of yarn and ribbon will take the eye 
of many a bird as "the weave of a kiltie will 
take the eye of a lassie," according to Harry 
Lauder, and whatever else the tartan is, it must 
be bright to be most pleasing. 

I recall a Wren's nest built in a gaudily-painted 
watering pot, the wrecked plaything of a child, 



A Last Year's Bird's Nest 213 

both the handle and the spout were missing, but it 
was clearly the thing the Wren long had sought 
and it was a possession she was ready to defend 
with her life if need be. 

If we took up the list of odd places in which 
we have known birds to build nests, like Tenny- 
son's Brook, the number would go on forever. 
Two we must mention. A Robin, possibly from 
Boston, built its nest in a hub ; one, from Maine, in 
a boot-leg. 

In China, there is an edible bird's nest, that is, 
edible to the Chinese, and they are welcome to 
my share; and in the far North many people get 
both food and drink, figuratively speaking, out of 
the Eider-ducks' nest, all the expensive Eider- 
down of commerce being from the nests of the 
birds who divest their own bodies to protect their 
ducklings. Surely nothing else in this world is 
born into quite so downy a nest. The value of 
the down has alone kept the duck from the exter- 
mination that overtook the Labrador Duck. 

The story of birds' nests is a rich lode of nat- 
ural history which if properly smelted, is easily 
beaten into leaves as numerous as the leaves of 
autumn. In other words, the man has not yet 
been born with the Seer's insight and the Magi- 
cian's touch to weave again the rare tapestry that 
Mother Nature's birds have been weaving since 
the world was fresh and young. The miracle of 



214 What Birds Have Done With Me 

it all, the nest and the egg, the egg and the bird, 
the bird and the flight, the flight and the song, in 
advance of the fact, if told for truth, it would 
have taxed the credulity of children and fools. 
A mass of protoplasm inside a shell, the shell 
for a few weeks kept warm by the heat of the 
mother's body, then something alive from within 
calling for the freedom that life demands, no an- 
swer from without, no offer of help, then the 
cramped, puny creature nerved to stupendous ef- 
fort by the very urge of existence, batters down its 
dungeon walls and for days may remain blind and 
helpless, or in twenty-four hours may be a full 
partaker of the life of its kind, running or swim- 
ming with the speed of adults. That the Ostrich 
chick should perform this prodigy is difficult of 
belief: that the unhatched Humming-bird should 
do likewise is unthinkable ; imagination lays down 
and will not come to our help. In this way, and 
in this way only, is bird life continued on this 
planet, where nest robbing is a business, a pastime 
and a science. 

In almost every country on the face of the 
earth, frequently open and above board and again 
secret and furtively, birds' eggs are articles of 
merchandise, the trade under the usual laws of 
trade, scarcity inflating prices. The rarer the 
species, the higher the price the eggs of some 
extinct species selling for hundreds of dollars each 



A Last Year's Bird's Nest 215 

to collectors. The eggs of our game birds since 
the settlement of the country, have, to some ex- 
tent, been used for food, following the customs 
of savage predecessors. Here is a modern in- 
stance of how eggs are eaten in the far North, 
by the natives. When not quite of age Benjamin 
Rogers, son of Dr. B. T. Rogers, President of 
Racine College, Racine, Wisconsin, went to 
Alaska to install an electric lighting plant for the 
Episcopal Mission at Point Hope. With five 
natives he paddled sixty miles to an island to col- 
lect Murre's eggs — the Murre incubates a single 
egg — and they filled their skin boat with such an 
enormous load that it took thirty-six hours' con- 
stant paddling to make the return trip. This inci- 
dent is only three years old and my intrepid young 
friend modestly confided the adventure to me on 
his return. The vast number of eggs collected as a 
pastime, could they be brought to light, would 
surprise the average Ornithologist, and astound 
the public. As a special Game Warden and Con- 
servation Warden, I have examined collections 
so extensive that no one would expect to find their 
equal outside of a museum. I recall one in par- 
ticular, the work of a retired farmer, living in a 
town of eighteen hundred population, carried on 
for years, the collection hidden in his barn and 
kept secret from all his neighbors. Though a 
close-fisted old fellow, he has bought most of his 



216 What Birds Have Done With Me 

eggs, many secretly from children, and had 
spent money to indulge this passion as he would 
not spend money for anything else. A devout 
church member, when I asked to see his collection 
he looked me in the face and most emphatically 
denied having one. The light of a star helped 
his memory and he took me to his barn, with 
profuse apologies. The necessity of catching a 
train prevented me from going through it all, 
but I had rarely seen the like in any private col- 
lection and this the strangest thing of all : he was 
afraid to own it, would neither sell nor give it 
away and had no one to leave it to. I imagine 
that I will not be believed when I assert that 
fortunes, both in this and other countries, are be- 
ing spent for birds' eggs and these collections will 
be inherited by people who in our better civiliza- 
tion, already knocking at the door, will be 
ashamed to have it known that among their an- 
cestors were nest robbers and they will secretly 
destroy a gruesome and worthless inheritance. 

"The Oologist" is the name of a little magazine 
having Science pilloried on its title page, the little 
mother of yellow journalism, for it is published 
in the interest of the birds' egg collector, the 
scientific birds' egg collector, if you please. Be- 
hold the noble ambition of "The Oologist" to 
promote the distribution of birds' eggs so that 
every museum and school shall have a collection, 



A Last Year's Bird's Nest 217 

the larger the better, that the sum of human 
knowledge may thus be increased. Granted that 
the object is primarily scientific, I challenge the 
right of the egg collector to make persistent in- 
roads upon our vanishing wild life, for we are 
not to lose sight of the fact that the egg of the 
rare bird is sought above all others. For a fact, 
collections of eggs and stuffed birds are of small 
value to the student of Ornithology and worthless 
to everyone else. The wise teacher of such 
studies says with the poet Bryant: "Go forth under 
the open sky and list to Nature's teaching," and 
the soul of the teacher who would send a student 
to a city to study a musty, moth-eaten collection 
of either birds or eggs, must be already dead 
within him. 

To me, an empty nest, a last year's bird's nest, 
if you please, is still wonderful — as wonderful as 
the life for which it stands. I have seen some 
of the great collections of eggs in this country 
with only weariness and disgust and I have found 
a half shell on my lawn and found in it a message 
so wonderful that when I append it here and at- 
tempt once more to tell its story, I have the same 
feeling that I had then, that the story of the 
half shell is not half told. 

To call one half of a blue shell an "Azurite" 
would be a stilted and fanciful way of speaking 
of a fragment of a Robin's egg found in the green 



218 What Birds Have Done With Me 

grass on the lawn, where the never-ending miracle 
of incubation had taken place in the tree above. 
Nevertheless, the one who found it felt that all 
words were inadequate to express something of 
wonder and awe in his inner consciousness aroused 
by the not at all uncommon find. 

Beautiful and fragile as the fragment was, it 
had played its part and was now a worthless thing 
to be cast aside, but the blue still suggested the 
sky and the creature that had come out of it, as 
belonging to another world — out of the blue, into 
the blue, a relationship between the near and 
remote. 

Surely there is no other day, but a June day, 
that comes in emerald robes and golden sandals 
across the far horizon with kisses, and more kisses, 
for all that are glad and rejoice in the great gift 
of life. On such a morning a world-weary man 
came hurrying across the lawn where his "Super 
Six" awaited him on the drive. As he drew near, 
instinctively, the owner of the fragment of blue 
shell closed his hand, as though it would not be 
kind to show a glimpse of Heaven to a poor 
wretch who was carrying about with him his own 
Hell. 

The unhappy man's story is scarcely more un- 
common than the fragment of shell. Here it is 
in brief. From his childhood, the poor worldling 
had been shut out from joy and gladness of the 



A Last Year's Bird's Nest 219 

wonder world about us. From a tenement, where 
foreigners were herded like cattle, he had climbed 
to the ownership of a big factory, an ill-smelling 
factory, from which dollars came in a stream and 
this stream had been augmented by war profits 
till it was a torrent submerging all the landmarks 
and carrying him out on a lonesome ocean, where 
there were nothing but dollars and where dollars 
would no longer buy a thing — all quite valueless. 
He was in the last stages of a new disease, that 
doctors could do worse than call Millionitis. 

When the wretched, sleepless, wandering 
Croesus had eliminated himself from the land- 
scape, the owner of the half shell shyly opened 
his hand and the first glance convinced him that 
the fairies had been doing things, while he had 
been only talking, for the blue had collected all 
the other rich coloring of a world of beauty. His 
eyes were suddenly ravished with the light of 
dawns, sunsets, waterfalls, rainbows, and look- 
ing to see that he was not observed, he held the 
fragment of shell to his ear, and as the sea shell 
sings of the ocean, his being was suddenly flooded 
with the bird song of the universe, a feathered 
"choir invisible." 

Time, like everything else in these days, is to 
be Hooverized and as a matter of fact, the 
man with the half shell had only stopped his lawn 
mower long enough to dip up a little of the dewy 



220 7V hat Birds Have Done With Me 

freshness of the June morning in the tiny blue cup 
in his hand. He knew very well that it would be 
quite impossible to get enough for a bath, but 
it would take no time to get enough to refresh the 
lips of the inner man of the heart. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

A SAINT BARTHOLOMEW OF BIRDS 

A massacre is indiscriminate slaughter with 
unnecessary cruelty, but as. it is practically never 
necessary, it is always cruel and outrageous. 
Hands red with innocent blood make indelible 
stains, and that people or nation indulging in 
blood lust is still in the swaddling clothes of a 
development just commencing. Massacre is a 
parent stem upon which mob violence is born in 
the shape of a gnarled and unripe fruit. Mob 
violence is an emotion often widely divorced from 
all sober, serious thought, in fact, it is incapable 
of thought, as thought would destroy the unrea- 
soning act. The world is just learning the pos- 
sibilities of unleashed passion with ignorance as a 
dynamo running wild. 

In Longfellow's "Tales of a Wayside Inn" is 
a poem entitled, "The Birds of Killingworth," 
and in that poem occur the words that serve as 
the caption of this chapter. The whole thing de- 
scribed with prophetic vision a Saint Bartholomew 
of Birds, restricted to a circumscribed area, which 



222 What Birds Have Done With Me 

later on became general, universal. Longfellow 
is really the pioneer writer on the economic value 
of bird life, their value in protecting growing 
things was seemingly as well known to the poet- 
naturalist as to any scientist who has followed 
him, examining stomachs and counting noxious in- 
sects found therein. In his vision he saw a mighty 
army of victorious worms, slimy, hideous, crawl- 
ing everywhere, with nothing left to check their 
onward march, now that the birds had all been 
killed. 

The birds were massacred by the very farmers 
whom they protected, for the reason that they 
were robbers of the harvest. It's the same class 
of men today who are doing nothing to save what 
is left of our bird neighbors, an allied army of 
bird soldiers fighting the onrush of wave after 
wave of insect life that will, if not checked, sweep 
the earth. When the men who had massacred 
the birds saw the ruinous nature of the thing they 
had done, they sent to other provinces and 
brought back those forms of life of which their 
fields and forests had been bereft and restored 
what was lost. A thing impossible when the 
countries of the earth have all exterminated their 
birds. The present bird massacre means bird 
extermination, final, eternal. 

While it may be true that we only know of the 
absolute extermination of a dozen to twenty 



A Saint Bartholomew of Birds 223 

species, a vast number of species are close to 
extermination. I, myself, have seen the awful 
decimation in the lost half century. I recall 
photographs of the aquatic life of the Saint John's 
River, Florida, taken forty years ago. I con- 
fess it seemed to be fairly crowded with a prodi- 
gal wealth of bird life, the like of which I had 
never even dreamed of, or waking, thought pos- 
sible. When I saw the river for the first time, a 
little over a dozen years ago, the almost com- 
plete absence of all life was more appalling than 
the teeming life that I still had in my mind's eye. 
Thousands were no longer represented by tens. 
From Jacksonville to Sanford, some two hundred 
miles, with the exception of blackbirds, I did not 
see altogether, fifty birds in the aggregate. With 
a good pair of glasses I watched from the upper 
deck, the dawn come over the lonely floods of 
water and for a long time nothing moved upon 
the face of the waters, and then far away some 
fugitive remnants of the life that had been and 
was gone. Yes! Longfellow was a prophet, had 
seen a vision and told the story, not only of the 
Saint John's River, but of the whole world in two 
lines. Did I recall them or were they actually 
spoken into my ear, so vivid and astonishing they 
seemed : 

"The wild wind went moaning everywhere, 
Lamenting the dead children of the air." 



224 Whai Birds Have Done With Me 

I, myself, witnessed the exodus of the Passen- 
ger Pigeon ; saw the flocks grow less and less, and 
finally vanish. The repulsive story of that great 
massacre is too well known to need repetition, 
and it is only worth while from its possible power 
to point a moral and adorn a tale. People said 
then, are saying now, you can't kill a species, they 
were not killed, they died of disease. The grace- 
ful Pigeon and the lordly Bison, strangely enough, 
were both afflicted with the same disease — human- 
itis, caused by the sting of a tiny microbe, the 
very deadliest on the earth. Within the historic 
period no race of creatures has become extinct 
without the aid of man, microbe, or "Lord High 
Executioner," call him what you will. 

Massacre is defined as indiscriminate slaughter, 
but not so of necessity as it may be very discrimi- 
nating, so things killed in great numbers by star- 
vation or the sly, prowling decimation of secret 
enemies, are scarcely slaughtered with violence. 
I wish to define my poetic sentence, at the head 
of this chapter as extensive, unnecessary killing 
with or without discrimination or violence. The 
destruction of a bird's natural environment with 
nothing to take its place, may look toward the 
final destruction of that species as certainly as 
work done with gun or club. The wholesale de- 
struction of great forests and the draining and 
cultivation of great areas of low land has meant 



A Saint Bartholomew of Birds 225 

death to certain species. Civilization does not 
mean bird extermination and certain harmless 
beneficial birds would flourish where the soil is 
largely cultivated, were they not harmed by en- 
emies having nothing to do with a changed en- 
vironment. Were districts reforested and tangles 
left along hedge-rows for hiding and nesting 
places, there need be slight loss of bird life. To 
this, if food was added in inclement weather in 
winter, these wild neighbors would become more 
than half domesticated in many instances. 

Among causes resulting in extensive destruction 
of bird life, I would put first of all, the all but 
universal armament of young boys with air-guns. 
Military training of boys makes the efficient 
army; the air-guns develop and make efficient, 
the adult hunter, killer, slaughterer. Three-year- 
olds go to camp in the space under the sitting- 
room table and there is enough witchery in the 
air-gun to connect their present camp with one in 
the wilderness, where this plaything shall be trans- 
formed into a real gun, and they, into mighty 
hunters. If you would question the "true sports- 
man," asking him when he became interested in 
hunting and if he answered truthfully, ninety-five 
per cent, would say, "Why, always, ever since I 
had my first air-gun." 

Children utterly ignorant of the commonest 



226 What Birds Have Done With Me 

birds are sent out with the injunction to kill only 
English sparrows, if they belong to families in 
that small minority who happen to know some- 
thing of the value of bird life, otherwise without 
any limitation as to what they shall kill, but the 
inability of the juvenile hunter to tell birds apart 
results in both cases, in the slaughter of all vari- 
eties of sparrows and other small brown birds. 
A couple of fairly-grown boys here in Biloxi shot 
seventy-one Cedar-Waxwings, calling them, and 
I think, honestly believing them, to be "a kind of 
English Sparrow." Thus many a bird has suf- 
fered death by proxy and the killing of one variety 
leads to the indiscriminate killing of all. Boys, 
air-guns, Sparrows, — all taken together, may 
seem of small significance and be only remotely 
related to bird annihilation, but are certainly ante- 
cedent causes. Why mob law for English Spar- 



rows 



In the treatment of this small stranger within 
our gates we have made an exception, if there 
was ever any reason for charging us with being 
Anglo-maniacs; the rule has been open hatred 
and in the neutrality of those professing it was 
the usual element of prejudice. 

Even State Audubon Societies have been made 
to seemingly endorse the "sparrow-trap" man 
and publications, carried on in the interest of 
bird protection, have advertised a scheme to help 



A Saint Bartholomew of Birds 227 

destroy a whole family of friendly little birds, 
and the members of civic organizations have often 
turned themselves into cunning Borgias with the 
same end in view. 

These visitors from over the sea have insisted 
on living in close proximity to their worst enemy, 
man, who has betrayed their trust and mobbed, 
killed, and persecuted them in every conceivable 
way, and done it in the name of bird protection. 
The cry has been: "They drive away our wild 
birds, rob their nests and even kill them." As a 
matter of fact, there isn't a word of truth in the 
charge ; man, the killer, has the monopoly in that 
kind of sorry persecution and destruction. After 
years of this treatment we are just beginning to 
find out that the English Sparrow is a real help 
in the struggle for existence and a beneficial bird 
in our war with noxious insects. The Federal 
Department of Agriculture is certainly in error 
when it proposes to incite Boy Scouts and school 
children in carrying out mob law against a bird 
really deserving protection. That the public 
press, somewhat generally, is protesting against 
this proposed "St. Bartholomew Massacre" of 
English Sparrows is most timely and may prevent 
a modern enactment of Longfellow's "Birds of 
Killingworth," which, if pulled off would be apt 
to cause "the spirits of the wise to sit in the clouds 
and mock us." It now looks as though the Eng- 



228 What Birds Have Done With Me 

lish Sparrow might soon be allowed to take out 
his first papers. 

No one thing would result in so great a saving 
of bird life as the passage of a law making the 
air-gun, like "a bird-cannon," a thing contraband, 
as detrimental, enormously destructive to forms 
of life, essential to the very continuance of vege- 
tation on the planet. The Federal Agricultural 
Department, having the enforcement of the 
Migratory Bird Law should stop the manufactory 
and sale of the harmless little air-gun, that like 
a dumb watch a little later on is sure to be changed 
to a live one. With no air-gun in the hands of 
the callow youngster, and no license to hunt till a 
boy has attained legal manhood, a mob 
is transformed into a drilled army. Can any- 
thing be more unwise than to make sportsmen 
out of the rising generation, and then hire War- 
dens to stay the killing of useful birds? Certain 
evils are best controlled as near as possible to the 
fountain head. 

The church and the school and the home must 
be made active in the cultivation of a superhuman 
soul against killing. Why prattle about the cul- 
tivation of human education? Education is always 
on the side of the killer; it's a wilderness where 
flesh-pots are the things most to be desired. 
"Thou shalt not kill" must some way be put into 
the super-soul of mankind, a new religion in which 



A Saint Bartholomew of Birds 229 

the non-shedding of blood shall be the central 
tenant. When such a super-consciousness be- 
comes universal a stain shall be removed from 
church, and the school and from all homes. 

Back of the Plume Pirates, shall we say higher 
up, are the women of our best society and back 
of them hideous, merciless Dame Fashion. Is 
there no flash of sympathy common to all moth- 
ers? Is it really possible that a human mother 
knowing that her borrowed plumes are secured 
at the cost of death to other mothers, dumb moth- 
ers, and the slow starvation of nestlings, can still 
want to wear trophies of a savagery that would 
shock savages? 

Men are not a whit behind the mothers of men 
in showing themselves merciless, though in their 
own cases they themselves are the killers, and 
back of the killing of big game you have but to 
scrutinize the so-called prowess to discover in it 
a vanity akin to that of the plume wearer. The 
great Arctic explorer, Stefansson, puts this thing 
in its true light: "With me, the matter of big 
game hunting is another case of swords sticking 
to hands that seek the plough. I am afraid that 
I am not a true sportsman. It is impossible for 
me to get enjoyment out of killing and if I did, 
I should get a job in the Chicago stock-yards 
rather than follow poor frightened wild things 
around with a rifle." 



230 What Birds Have Done With Me 

It is mere nonsense to talk of wild animals 
having a chance for their lives against the hunter. 
No matter how well provided by nature with claw 
and teeth and stout muscles, they have scarce more 
chance against a man with a modern rifle than a 
"fly against a sledge-hammer." 

When the whole people become aware of the 
value of insectivorous birds, they will not permit 
their annual massacre by what have been called, 
and in most quarters are still considered, "per- 
fectly good tabby cats." In a late issue of the 
New Orleans Times-Picayune was published: "In 
memoriam of five thousand perfectly good tabby 
cats." There is no such thing as a perfectly good 
tabby cat, except a dead one. The world would 
be better off if these Huns, these alien enemies, 
these marauding vermin, were every one forced to 
"go west." 

They are costly pets, pets that make no return 
for the affection lavished upon them, and are 
menaces, as spreaders of contagion, to the house- 
holds that foster them. Its irresistibly charm- 
ing purr is the camouflage of a diminutive tiger 
that never has been really domesticated. 

The vast majority of cats secure their soft 
cushions and warm places by the fire through false 
pretenses; not one in ten will catch a mouse, and 
not one in a hundred will kill a rat. Your "per- 
fectly good tabby cat" is the most blood-thirsty 



A Saint Bartholomew of Birds 231 

of all animals and the most terrible scourge to 
bird life — the vanishing wild life — of America. 
"True sportsmen," "pot hunters," "the negro with 
the $3 gun" all together do not begin to kill as 
many birds as dear, innocent Tabby. Some- 
where around 300,000,000 annually is supposed 
to be a fair estimate of puss's destruction of game 
and insectivorous birds. 

It has been well said that the cat fears no law 
and knows no master; you cannot train his claws 
not to rend, nor his teeth not to tear. It goes 
without saying that a creature that has taken pos- 
session of the home is bound to be protected by the 
affection of the whole household and much in the 
way of education will be required to dislodge it. 
The cat menace to bird life is ten times as great in 
the South as in the North, for there, the animals 
breed to starvation lines and the milder climate 
seems favorable to Tabby's attaining length of 
days; her nine lives being increased to at least 
eighteen. 

Sportsmen are only comparatively recently fac- 
ing the killing off of whole species and the best in- 
formed among their number, are appalled by facts 
that no longer can be ignored. They quite gen- 
erally admit the Massacre of the Passenger 
Pigeon, but the latest palliation is the statement 
that it was a good thing for the farmer. The 
threatened extinction of Ducks comes home to 



232 W 'hat Birds Have Done With Me 

them and they protest against the general massa- 
cre of the past. 

Close upon the heels of worry among sportsmen 
over the disappearance of the wild pigeon and the 
early extinction of the prairie chicken, comes pre- 
diction of the end of the mallard duck. An East- 
ern writer observes: 

"Formerly mallards existed in abundance, hard 
to realize at the present time. Until after the war 
( 1 861-1865) the ponds of middle South Carolina 
supported millions of them each winter. The 
noise of their flight sometimes deafened one. 
They were killed by the wagonload. At Big Lake, 
Arkansas, in the winter of 1 893-1 894, a single 
pot hunter sold 8000 mallards, and 120,000 were 
sent to market. In Calcasieu parish, Louisiana, 
last winter 250,000 mallards were killed. Hun- 
dreds of tons were killed at Lake Malheur, Ore- 
gon, for their feathers. In Canada and along the 
many lakes up to Hudson Bay, duck eggs were 
sold by the million, their contents to be used in 
glue factories and for the refining of sugar." 

The Superior Telegram, deploring the ruthless 
treatment of the mallard, contrasts him with the 
wild pigeon to the latter's disadvantage. The 
bird, it says, was a good riddance, though tooth- 
some when young and fat. The farming industry 
could not afford to maintain him, because he was 
a vegetarian, and never harmed an insect. The 



A Saint Bartholomew of Birds 233 

mallard, on the other hand, robs nobody. "He 
lives on the cresses and celeries of the waters, and 
his flesh is superior to that of his canvasback or 
redhead cousin. Every state ought to take meas- 
ures to conserve him, else soon we shall know him 
no more." What is needed in addition to game 
laws is public sentiment backed by public spirit 
that will condemn their non-observance. Without 
enlightened civic consciousness on the subject of 
protecting the wild birds, their numbers will rapid- 
ly decrease, and beyond question a time will come 
when the multiplication of insect pests will avenge 
the slaughter of the feathered races. 

Most of the hunting on our Lake, is at the 
Head, or down at the inlet; both localities having 
a more or less variety of attractive duck food. 
At the head the ducks cross from their feeding 
ground on a near-by marshy lake to the protection 
of the open water of our lake and were frequently 
slaughtered in great numbers, night and morning, 
on the portage between the lakes. If there are 
Ducks anywhere you can safely count on finding 
a goodly number at the inlet. When the country 
was first settled Adolph Buzze not infrequently 
used to bring a "Dugout" full from the inlet, the 
result of a few hours' shooting.^ Adolph was ut- 
terly without education, as we understand the 
meaning of the word, though he actually under- 
stood more than the average man, the mystery of 



234 What Birds Have Done With Me 

the teeming life in the world about him. Though 
he may often have wandered and lost his way, 
every trail he followed led him back to God. Sim- 
ple minded, good hearted, he hunted and trapped 
as he chopped wood to support his family. He 
was a "pot hunter," an epithet of loathing and 
contempt to every "true sportsman," and it is at 
men of this class that all of our protective game 
laws are aimed. 

The other day a very different style of a man 
hunted at the inlet. Everything about him was 
strictly up-to-date, or rather of the 1919 model. 
He was the antipode of Adolph, the "pot hunter," 
he killed for sport, as every true sportsman does. 
In the twilight of a November day he came into 
his store with a single trophy, a solitary Mallard, 
the only living thing that he had seen to shoot 
at, down at the inlet. He gave an animated de- 
scription of his kill: "I thought I was going to be 
'skunked' when I saw the vagabond in the rushes 
near shore. He let me come so close that a first 
I thought he must have a broken wing and could 
not fly, but just as Billy was going to give him one 
with the paddle he got up like a flash and I natu- 
rally blew that green head of his into the middle 
of next week." There were not wanting those 
who laughed and called him lucky in letting noth- 
ing get away, and none had any appreciation of 
the fact that it was a wounded or a sick bird that 



A Saint Bartholomew of Birds 235 

had furnished the animated target for one who 
only shot according to law in the "Open Sea- 
son. 

A leading business man, and an exceptionally 
fine fellow, who has hunted all his life, said only 
yesterday: "I have only recently learned that I 
can get my necessary exercise out of doors at Golf 
and am no longer lending a hand in helping de- 
stroy our vanishing wild life." 

When Theodore Roosevelt was collecting ma- 
terial for his bloody "African Game Trails," his 
friend and admirer, John Burroughs, said of his 
passion to kill things : "Later on he'll slough this 
off." 

Is it too much to hope that America, the most 
progressive and civilized country on the face of 
the earth, will: "Later on slough off" an "Open 
Season"? 

In a general way it is better to look ahead than 
to look backward, but progress must be measured 
by the backward look. Everything is comparative 
and conditions actually bad, showing betterment 
are not without hope. It is the wide view that 
often makes Giant Despair, at the mouth of his 
cave, look like a single plant louse on the thorny 
stem of Time. 

Our Government needs ammunition to fight 
the great battle for world-wide Democracy, but 
the "true sportsman" needs his recreation and we 



236 What Birds Have Done With Me 

hear nothing of any restriction on the amount of 
fixed ammunition to be poured into our vanishing 
wild life, during the coming "open season." The 
slaughter of our bird neighbors for sport is a 
shameful reversion to savage ancestors — I beg 
pardon of these same ancestors — they were sav- 
ages but not guilty of that civilized, smug, blood- 
thirstiness. However great the discouragements 
of our immediate surroundings, the wide look 
shows real progress in bird protection. If straws 
show in what direction the wind blows, the tiny 
fact that Metropolitan Newspapers are devoting 
space to bird lore indicates a better future for our 
birds. May we not go farther and see the ap- 
proach of Halcyon days in that future when we 
find reference in a department of "Woods and 
Waters," to the kingfisher as a brother fisher- 
man? 

Oh! soul of mine remember, 
There is really naught to fear, 
The days are growing brighter, 
Each day throughout the year. 



CHAPTER XIX 

SOME INVISIBLE DEFENDERS 

In one of our recent magazines there were seven 
articles pertaining to the world war, and one, 
beautifully illustrated, giving some account of an- 
other army, rarely noticed by the average person, 
whose annual campaign against hordes of noxious 
insects saves every forest in America. This is 
no insignificant Council of Defence, working for 
the general good, unhonored and unsung. 

Igdrasil, according to Norse mythology, is 
the ash tree of existence, and all life is represented 
by this fabulous tree. The winds among its 
branches are both shouting and whispering the 
messages of Igdrasil. The forests are its 
children and lovingly, devotedly, the birds watch 
and protect these children, scattered so widely 
over the face of the earth. All flesh is grass, 
and grass, protected by the bird soldier, stands 
for food and nourishment, but the tree has its 
direct relationships, vast and tender, with home, 
and home in very fact is the substance of things 
hoped for. The singing army going through the 
237 



238 What Birds Have Done With Me 

tree-tops is in reality providing you with a roof- 
tree and a back-log, and this Dr. Henshaw, in the 
"National Geographic Magazine," the one re- 
ferred to, calls "A Supreme Service." Think of 
it; an aviation service, raining only blessings upon 
the earth. 

There is not a tree, symbol of strength and 
beauty and receiving station for messages from the 
unseen, that did not have hundreds of insect ene- 
mies waiting for it when it came into existence, 
and without the immediate protection of the birds 
would have been quickly destroyed, and on the 
other hand, there is not a giant among all the 
trees of the forest who would long exist without 
its Guardian Angel, the bird soldier. The only 
real fairy stories are the ones that are actually 
taking place around us all the time, but for which 
we have no eyes. Solomon in all his glory was 
not apparelled like many of our birds, and their 
service belongs to a vaster temple than he ever 
dreamed of — a temple not made with hands, in 
which music and service are one and inseparable. 

Now that the war is over and the professional 
tree slaughter is organizing to meet an unpre- 
cedented demand for lumber of all kinds, the Na- 
tion's sylvan treasury will be ruthlessly exploited 
as never before. It almost seems as though both 
the tree and the bird soldier are doomed, but the 
apprehension must give place to greater determi- 



Some Invisible Defenders 239 

nation to conserve both. The poor narrow-mind- 
ed lumberman, who sees in a tree only possible 
lumber must be made to dip into the future and 
conserve a natural resource for his children and 
his children's children, protecting and renewing 
rather than destroying. God save the world from 
the greed of ignorant little men. 

Arrogance and ignorance shroud the morning 
and the evening of existence of the dyed-in-the- 
wool money grubber, who would sell his Lord for 
fifteen pieces of silver if he could not get thirty. 
To them, outside of a sordid commercialism, there 
is nothing; and were beauty and song exposed on 
the block, among them all there would not be 
found a single bidder. People who know all can't 
be told a single thing. 

That we are the people and wisdom will die 
with us, is probably the conviction of most races 
of human beings. Any idea of kinship with other 
forms of life is not to be tolerated; we are the 
proud possessors of a god-like reason, the brute 
creation of a blind instinct far removed from 
man's lofty endowment. Such a belief makes 
easier the universally accepted notion of a divinely 
given dominion over the beasts of the fields and 
the fowls of the air and all that passeth through 
the depths of the sea. Careful investigation goes 
to show that there is not such a mighty chasm 
between reason and instinct as has been commonly 



240 What Birds Have Done With Me 

supposed to separate us from our little brothers of 
the field and forest. The word instinct is a blan- 
ket term covering a world of ignorance. When a 
toothless old man soaks his crust in his coffee, the 
act is prompted by reason; when a duck, that has 
only rudimentary salivary glands carries a hard 
crust some little distance to soak it in water, it 
acts from instinct. A man through local attach- 
ment prompted by reason, may travel across a con- 
tinent to get back to the place of his birth; but a 
wild duck, hatched in an incubator, may have 
the same kind of local attachment, prompting it to 
leave a body of water, its native element, and cross 
a busy street that it might again enjoy a familiar 
environment in close contact with human crea- 
tures, the barrier of fear having been broken 
down. Instinct is a great matter for it enabled 
the wild ducks, spoken of above, to find their way 
back over a road that they had never seen, over 
which a man with all his reason might have wan- 
dered and lost his way. It is said of man that 
"Joy and grief and hope and fear alternate tri- 
umph in his breast," as though these were the 
distinguishing qualities of the great gift of rea- 
son, but as a matter of fact, dumb creatures, with 
only instinct for a guide, are not strangers to like 
emotions. True religion and undefiled is in a 
recognition of the inestimable value of life, that 
the highest and lowest hold in common, something 



Some Invisible Defenders 241 

to be guarded with the greatest care and never 
recklessly sacrificed. Love and pity are two angels 
guarding a sacred flame that once extinguished 
may not be rekindled — Love's Red Cross protect- 
ing all life. "He who in his own soul perceives 
the supreme soul in all beings, and acquires equa- 
nimity toward them all, attains the highest state of 
bliss." 

According to high authority, civilization means 
"to reclaim from a savage state; instruct in the 
arts and refinements of civilized life." Thus we 
are taught to regard civilization and not savagery 
as the adornments of a condition of splendid prog- 
ress. Facts are stubborn things and lend no coun- 
tenance to such very superficial conclusions. As 
a matter of fact, the centuries grow weary over 
the slowness of the thing we call civilization as it 
creeps in petty pace from age to age. Man has 
spent Aeons in getting on his hind feet, and it 
seems as though more Aeons will have to drift 
down the abyss of time before he is really re- 
claimed from his innate savagery. To civilize is 
a process; civilization a dream. The arts flour- 
ish and refinement dies. 

The soul of refinement is consideration for 
everything that lives. A universal sense of com- 
passion for every form of being that in common 
with ourselves, fears and would escape death. 
Across the beautiful Lawson Road, between the 



242 What Birds Have Done With Me 

Maplewood and the village of Green Lake, I re- 
cently found the bloody body of a mother Coot 
done to death by some fine gentleman, to whom 
the creature was but an animated target. He gave 
no thought of a possible callow brood in a nest 
that stood for skill and mother love, where waters 
dream and green flags tell their story to the pass- 
ing breeze. Peradventure his friends congratu- 
lated him on his skill as a mighty hunter; no stain 
of blood, in the estimation of people of the high- 
est refinement, follows such a petty murder. 

Here is the whole thing in a nutshell. Humane 
education is preparedness for Civilization. 

There is a story that after all their defeats 
when the victorious army of crusaders marched 
into the Holy City, all comrades who had been 
killed in battle, and from disease had fallen out 
by the way, joined the army once more to take 
part in the final triumph. It is not only a pretty 
story but is symbolical of the way victories are 
won to-day; thus are all battles fought by the liv- 
ing and the dead, the visible and the invisible. In 
the late war in Europe, take our part in it; Grant 
and Sherman, Lee and Stonewall Jackson were 
Pershing's Aids, and Washington and Lincoln 
stand close to Woodrow Wilson. Woe to that 
nation or that cause that has no invisible defend- 
ers. Visible orators are as children playing in the 
market place compared to the deathless eloquence 



Some Invisible Defenders 243 

of those whom we call dead. What matter if the 
body lies mouldering in the grave so long as the 
soul goes marching on? The death of Audubon 
in no way interfered with his work as poet-natu- 
ralist — a real John the Baptist in the wilderness 
preparing the way for all naturalists who could 
but follow after him along the trail he blazed. 
Among the living of to-day there is not to be found 
among bird-students another whose work and in- 
fluence is to be compared in virile force and power 
of inspiration with the first Commander-in-Chief 
of the present army of bird-lovers. William Dut- 
cher, voiceless, speechless for nearly ten years, 
through the influence of the Audubon Society, 
never spoke more eloquently in all his useful, beau- 
tiful life than to-day. Audubon and Dutcher 
rank high as two mighty invisible defenders of 
the bird kingdom and those on the firing line had 
as well pull down their flag, were it not for them 
and all other invisible defenders of our vanishing 
wild life. 

If bird-lovers were without the spiritual in- 
sight that sees in death no intimation of the less- 
ening of a man's ability to still further his own 
work, the passing of Theodore Roosevelt would 
be a cause for putting on crepe, and hearing in 
bird-song a vast, sad requiem. As President, he 
established the principle of government bird-reser- 
vations, and created thirty-eight of these national 



244 What Birds Have Done With Me 

wild-life sanctuaries. He was a man of the out- 
of-doors, a hunter and a bird-lover. It was said 
of him that "he shot lions with a rifle and birds 
with a field glass. The second sport he loved 
better than the first." How much of a real bird- 
lover he was is just becoming known and the 
world is going to remember him not on account 
of the lions, or other wild animals he killed and 
thus preserved, but for the efforts he put forth to 
make bird protection respectable and popular. 
The statesman and the writer will now be merged 
into the invisible defender of the invisible de- 
fenders of forest and field and all growing things. 
"Mourny," "Moses," "Mr. Esau" and "Can- 
ada" have long been dead, but death, only made 
them, through me, invisible defenders of things 
very much alive. The hard bitter materialism so 
dominant in life to-day has to be reckoned with 
and we have to learn the lesson of a higher, finer 
civilization that takes cognizance of the invisible 
and spiritual that moves the obvious and material. 
I, for one, love to think of every hard dollar 
that Mrs. Russell Sage gave to establish a Bird- 
refuge in the South, for instance, as being trans- 
muted into tender spiritual impulses for better 
things that invisibly will flow on and on so long 
as Hope shall prompt Love to conquer human 
selfishness. 



Some Invisible Defenders 245 

The vision of to-day is the reality of to-morrow 
and on the reality of many to-morrows, faith will 
stand to catch the visions of all the coming years. 



CHAPTER XX 



GETTING ACQUAINTED 



In whatever direction we turn, we are con- 
fronted with certain visible or invisible barriers 
that have to be surmounted before any progress 
can be made. Indeed we are strangers and pil- 
grims here and will so remain unless we become 
acquainted with our environment and make friends 
with other forms of life. In the oldest Poem in 
the language is this imperative command: "Ac- 
quaint now thyself with Him and be at peace; 
thereby good shall come unto thee." The thought 
is self-evident. Immediate acquaintance, imme- 
diate peace, and both followed by unqualified good. 
Taking the old commandment to pieces, in an- 
other way it may be justly inferred that acquaint- 
ance has been procrastinated and there has been 
no realization that there is a benediction of peace 
following knowledge. The ancients located truth 
at the bottom of a well and we are just learning 
that good flows only in certain fixed channels, 
knowledge finds the channels. 

Knowledge is that quality that enables us to 
246 



Getting Acquainted 247 

recognize what is best. Knowledge is the Drago- 
man among ancient Pyramids, and the interpreter 
of whispering winds and the song of the open road. 
Yesterday, its garden of memory, to-day, its work- 
shop, to-morrow, its mount of visions. The police 
dog that made the trip from San Diego to New 
York and return, with Major Albert Smith 
through the air, learned precious little of the 
country over which he passed. And so it is with 
us who make the journey of the years and fail to 
acquaint ourselves with our environment. I sup- 
pose the person who travels far and learns noth- 
ing, might as well have remained at home and the 
one who goes through life without learning any- 
thing might just as well have never been born. 
All education is just getting acquainted, finding 
out things about things that actually exist. A real 
teacher is a way shower and has nothing to do 
with the fellow who pretends to be able to sell you 
a big chunk of knowledge that you can carry home 
with you, to be wrapped up in a sheep-skin, the 
sheep-skin to be used to burnish the family escut- 
cheon. 

Erudition would lose most of its strut and fan- 
like tail feathers if people only knew that back 
of its fuss and feathers, it simply stands for get- 
ting acquainted. 

I have looked out of a car window and counted 
as we rolled by, two hundred and fifty telegraph 



248 What Birds Have Done With Me 

poles. I knew them as telegraph poles, they all 
looked alike, there was no question of the cor- 
rectness of my identification of them, but there 
was a lot of facts concerning them of which I 
knew nothing. For many years I was the owner 
of two hundred and fifty sheep. I knew that they 
were sheep and looked much alike and there was 
no question of the correctness of my identification 
of the kind of animal that I called a sheep. How- 
ever, my knowledge did not stop with a few facts, 
as it did in the case of the telegraph poles, for all 
my life I had a close and intimate acquaintance 
with sheep, beginning with a single individual when 
I was a lad. I came to know this individual so 
well that when more were added and I became 
the owner of a little flock, each remained an indi- 
vidual, and when, much later in life, I owned the 
big flock, each had its individuality as much as two 
hundred horses I have owned and a thousand head 
of cattle. 

I knew my horses and cattle by name, and the 
faces and voices and personality of every sheep 
in my flock. Just as soon as you come to 
know things as individuals, they cease to look 
alike. I was making an address not so long ago 
to an audience of tourists, most of whom were 
well past middle life and few of whom I knew 
personally, and I remember of having thought 
that among them was a general resemblance great- 



Getting Acquainted 249 

er than among the last flock of sheep which I sold 
twenty years ago and some of whose faces I still 
remember. Those I remember best had names 
and nick names; their faces are unforgettable. 
Beginning with the first colt I owned, when I was 
fourteen years of age, I can give not only his 
name and color, but his minute history — his per- 
sonality — and that is equally true of at least a 
hundred and ninety successors to skittish, panicky 
Cruser. 

Now I suppose that it would be possible to find 
at the stock yards in Chicago, individuals who 
have bought and sold millions of sheep, who have 
utterly failed to learn as much of the animal 
as an animal from their millions, as I learned 
from my individual cosset lamb. 

I know a man who, in the last forty years, has 
approximately prepared and mounted the skins 
of ten thousand birds, but, while thus in close 
contact with birds, so far as really learning any- 
thing of the real life of the creature he handled, 
its possibilities and limitations, its good and evil, 
its individuality and personality; he might as well 
have spent his time sawing wood. Indeed, I think 
that the more a man knows of the inside of a bird, 
the less he knows about the outside ; the more he 
knows of a bird scientifically, the less he is apt to 
know about the creature's aesthetic, spiritual, com- 
panionable worth. 



250 What Birds Have Done With Me 

"To the making of books there is no end," 
said the wise man, before the invention of the 
art of printing, and now, when they are being 
scattered broad-cast like the leaves of Autumn, I 
feel that a man should have some pretty valid 
excuse for presuming to add another to an already 
discouraging number. Now that my little craft 
is on the ways preparatory to launching, I feel 
that I must make this matter clear and give my 
excuse for another bird book. It seems to me, 
that so far, every writer on the subject has been 
possessed to tell what he has done with birds, and 
I approach the subject in an entirely opposite 
direction, in an entirely opposite spirit; while I 
admit the scientific side of bird study as valu- 
able within stern limitations, I am dealing with 
things alive, interesting, beautiful, wonderful, 
with scarcely an exception, as a whole, valuable 
beyond all computation, and individuals among 
them ranking high among my most valued helpful 
friends. Where it purports to be history, it is 
real history and while I have been telling of what 
birds have done for me, I have not dared to tell 
how much they have done or how great their influ- 
ence has been. I will fail utterly if I fail to give 
the personal touch; leaving your hearts unmoved 
by my portrayal of the adorable little ways of 
some of my adorable little friends. The only 



Getting Acquainted 251 

magic I have discussed has been the magic of 
real friendship, my sympathies always on the side 
of the hunted and always protesting against the 
killer who killed for fun. 

Here is the general law that governs all ac- 
quaintance with animate things; from an intimate 
acquaintance with individuals of a race we ar- 
rive at a general acquaintance with all the mem- 
bers of that race. Thinking of members of the 
human race, for instance, as Japs, Slavs and 
Orientals, is conclusive evidence that intimate ac- 
quaintance with members of those races has not 
enabled us to sink out of sight the big blur of 
Nationality. Personality and friendship quickly 
efface the mere tag of racial distinction and aloof- 
ness. We only know them when we know their 
mentality, their place in the scheme of Nature, 
their possible comradeship and affection. 

John Sawyer, a Jap in my class in the Uni- 
versity, whose name we could never learn to pro- 
nounce, and so called him that — stands to me for 
all his race. Intellectually brilliant, gentle, kind- 
ly, his personality, over enormous handicaps, car- 
ried him forward to popularity, and though none 
of us had seen his like before, he won the friend- 
ship of all. After going back to his own country 
he wrote me, I presume as a joke, quite a long let- 
ter in his own language, not one word of which I 



252 What Birds Have Done With Me 

have been able to decipher, and I not only still 
cherish it, but what is more, I never got so much 
out of any other letter. 

I never thought of Robins as a kind of bird 
bearing that name, but to me they are all the rela- 
tives of "Big-Bellied Hen," with whose amazing 
history I became familiar while still in kilts. Fig- 
uratively speaking, I never see a "Cock-Robin" 
without looking around apprehensively for the 
"Sparrow with his Bow-and-Arrow." Naturally 
under these circumstances, I feel that I do well 
to be angry when the Biological Survey, having 
charge of the enforcement of the Federal Migra- 
tory Law, yawns and asks the time of day when 
I send them an account of a Negro having in his 
possession "A Barrel of Pickled Robins." How 
many doves would it take to mourn for a barrel 
of dead Robins? Not enough I fancy to reach the 
cars of the officials at Washington. 

Going back to those sheep again. A few years 
ago I was being taken to a Hospital for an opera- 
tion that promised one chance of recovery in five 
thousand and the auto, in which I had been placed 
to ride from the Station to the Hospital, was 
stopped almost as soon as we got started, by a 
vast flock of sheep on their way to the stock yards 
and the shambles. Their voices awoke ten thou- 
sand old memories and I scrutinized each passing 
face for resemblance to "Nan and Lilly" my two 



Getting Acquainted 253 

first Cosset lambs, and was relieved that there 
was not a familiar look on a single face. Even 
here, I was generalizing from "Nan and Lilly," to 
a personal knowledge of a whole bleating race. 
It had been the night before when the passing 
flock of wild Geese right over the house called me 
back from the coma into which I seemed to be 
sinking. Dead "Canada" was the leader and was 
pointing the way to the still waters that would 
quench my intolerable thirst. Now I might have 
shot and dressed and cooked a score of Geese, and 
eaten a different part of each without coming to 
know a thing worth while about "Canada," "The 
element of life in God's great picture of Autumn." 
Once upon a time (as all true stories begin), 
we occupied my wife's Uncle's Cottage in Florida, 
and the Post Master and general merchant in the 
near-by village, wanting to discharge some obli- 
gation to this Uncle, came with guns, dogs, Ponies, 
and Buck-Board to take me hunting. He certain- 
ly had not come because he knew me, and had 
planned the expedition because he did not know 
me. We drove directly to an entirely deserted 
village four miles away, where private informa- 
tion had reached him that game was simply wait- 
ing to be killed. And so it proved, for we had not 
hitched the Ponies in an old shed before he dis- 
covered an immense covey of Quail in the rank 
growth of weeds not ten feet away. He thrust 



254 What Birds Have Done With Me 

a cocked double-barreled shot gun into my hands 
and said in a tense whisper: "Give 'em one bar- 
rel on the ground and the next, when they get up." 
I am surprised that I heard him, for, in some un- 
accountable way, I was back in that Wisconsin 
swamp where I had helped round up the oxen on 
that far way June morning, and these tiny feath- 
ered things did not look much larger than "Mrs. 
Stumpy's chicks" and not nearly as wild. For 
some reason this covey had not been hunted and 
were unafraid. If very hungry, I might have 
done it, or if wife or children needed meat, but 
kill a Bob White, a thing in a wide sense related 
to "Mrs. Stumpy," for fun; that I could not do. 
I scarcely remember how I tried to square myself, 
I know it was no use to try to make him under- 
stand, and I was quite willing to have him think 
me "bug-house." 

Only last winter a County official in a South- 
ern City, with an auto, and dogs, and guns, and 
another mighty hunter, and two women Dianas, 
pulled up in front of a Drug Store and the host 
called his father out to see the spoil of a two days' 
hunt, eighty Bob Whites. The white haired old 
gentleman, and he was a gentleman, congratulated 
the party with beaming face, so sorry that he 
could not have had a hand in the splendid sport. 
Honestly, I did not understand their feeling any 
more than they could understand mine while we 



Getting Acquainted 255 

were both looking on the same thing — a string of 
dead birds. I grant them their point of view, 
but honestly, had the string been Irish potatoes 
instead of Quail that they as kitchen police in a 
Cantonment, during the world war, had prepared 
for use, by the process called peeling, I would 
have thought it much more worthy of congratula- 
tion. 

Somewhere, I have seen a picture of a mighty 
hunter, with a wide, wide smile on his refined face, 
and Duck, and Ducks, and Ducks, and more 
Ducks festooning, smothering his manly form. 
Of course it was in a saloon, where only moder- 
ate drinking is indulged in, and the joyous com- 
pany is celebrating the grand victory of one of 
their own number. It was almost like the ovation 
we give to returning soldiers who have been mak- 
ing the world safe for democracy. I do not see 
this aggregation of dead things as ducks, but as 
individual ducks, each with an unknown individu- 
ality and personality, with somewhat rudimentary 
traits and faculties in the main, but with other 
traits far surpassing human reason, or human sen- 
timent. They are nearly all Mallards and I knew 
a certain Green-headed Mallard who opened the 
door into the secret archives of his race. Else- 
where in this volume I have told of "Mally's" 
mating with a single white Pekin Duck, and it 
will be easy for these fine gentlemen to under- 



256 What Birds Have Done With Me 

stand his loyalty and devotion to his choice of a 
single mate and perhaps they will take off their 
hats to world voyagers, even though they have to 
be taken home by the police, late at night. 

The Rose-Breasted Grosbeak on the winter 
hat of the florid lady, who sits just in front of us 
at church, is no kind of a teacher of bird lore and 
I am fully convinced that every florid and devout 
lady in the congregation might boast the same 
adornment, the aggregate amounting to quite a 
little flock, and the flock would leave me in deep, 
dark and awful ignorance of the things most 
worth while in the individuality of one of their 
number. I might even concentrate upon the near- 
est bird, before and after the prayer and from 
the opening hymn to the Doxology, without learn- 
ing that the birds present, in life, could have made 
that surpliced Choir sound like a Hawaiian Band. 
Intense concentration upon the possibilities of this 
bird during firstly, secondly, and thirdly, of the 
long-winded sermon, might still have left me in 
shameful ignorance of the fact that this bird, be- 
yond all other birds, has a full-sized appetite for 
potato bugs. On the other hand, "Mr. Esau" 
was a living teacher and taught me all I need to 
know about Grosbeaks, and at the close of the 
term I was as much fed up with knowledge as he, 
with White Grubs. 

"Mourny" and "Mr. Moses" were my primary 



Getting Acquainted 257 

teachers; "Mr. Waxwing" and "Gooey Bill" 
helped me through the grades, and the Chicka- 
dees and Grackles saw me graduate from High 
School, and when in College my thesis on: "Yor- 
ick" secured for me my degree of B. M. — Bird 
Man. I am not quite clear on this point, but 
fancy that I may have been admitted to the Bar, 
as "The Birds' Attorney" when I used to take 
"Canada" down to the Lake every day for a 
swim. 

My Father's experience as a teacher had mini- 
mized the value to be obtained exclusively from 
School Books, and he gave us children a large ad- 
mixture of current reading, including all of Dick- 
ens. The characters became real personages to 
us and we knew them just as well as we knew the 
people in the near-by village. It's not an ex- 
aggeration to say that it would scarcely have sur- 
prised any of us children to have turned the corner 
and come face to face with Daniel Quilp, Sampson 
Brass, or Miss Miggs, any more than it would 
have surprised us to have met George Hyer, "Pug 
Hamilton" and Miss Talker, all residents of the 
town, whom we knew as well as we knew our own 
names. Later on, when I went away to school, I 
heard to my utter astonishment, people discus- 
sing Dickens' works in a well-bred and pedantic 
manner and yet they did not know a single char- 
acter intimately, and would not have stopped to 



258 What Birds Have Done With Me 

listen if they had heard Barnaby Rudge's Raven 
saying: "I'm a Devil, I'm a Devil, I'm a Devil." 
The glib talk of volumes, ignoring characters, 
seemed most vague and unsatisfactory, as though 
some one was setting up to have acquired a thor- 
ough knowledge of China by memorizing the 
names of all the different kinds of tea grown in 
that country. 

The veil of a temple has been rent and you are 
being admitted into a Holy of Holies when the 
barrier of fear between you and forms of wild life 
is rolled up like a scroll, and you become friends 
and comrades. 

Is it not a shameful thing that man, the image 
of his Maker, is an object of terror to his little 
brothers of the field and forest? Among unnum- 
bered monsters, there is nothing else that inspires 
such universal fear, such a mad frenzy of apprer 
hension. They will complain that they found the 
game wild. Which is the wilder, the hunted or the 
hunters? These wild things so relentlessly pur- 
sued to their death were naturally tame and full 
of confidence till man made of himself a "scare- 
crow" — a shamming presentiment of evil. 

In the September "Recreation" there is a pic- 
ture of a man, sitting on the ground, a grouse 
perched on his arm. Though often found near 
human habitations, it is reckoned among our wild- 
est birds. A lonely U. S. mail carrier, in a bit of 



Getting Acquainted 259 

woods, where he halts for dinner and to feed his 
horse, convinces this shy denizen of the forest 
that he is no Killer, and in no time they are 
friends, each born again and each thrilled by the 
indescribable joy of strange intimacies. 

The Canada goose, world voyager of the upper 
air, a vanishing picture of the day and a weird 
voice of the heavy night, is commonly regarded as 
the wildest of all things, and yet after a few weeks 
of the close relations of surgeon and patient the 
barrier of fear was broken down and my wild 
goose would come at my call like a dog. There is 
no miracle about this. I have simply ceased to 
stand for the most gruesome, hideous thing in 
all the Universe of God — an eternal, all-embrac- 
ing fear. 

Some years ago an American writer of books 
gave one this title: "He Fell in Love With His 
Wife," and, though I never read the book, I can 
imagine that the feeling must have been akin to 
that experienced by the man who starts in to get 
really well acquainted with a very familiar bird. 
It's a mutual surprise party, they knew each other 
so well and yet they did not know each other at 
all. They had passed the time of day for years, so 
to speak, but never for a single hour had they 
paused "to loaf and invite their souls," The man 
who fell in love with his wife was a worshipper of 
beauty and his own wife was the most beautiful 



260 What Birds Have Done With Me 

woman in the world, but he did not know it. He 
was always looking for comradeship and she was 
the only person who could share fully every 
thought and feeling that had ever swept his be- 
ing; his parched lips had been seeking gladness 
and though he knew it not, her heart was its over- 
flowing fountain. Many a "Sir Galahad" has 
ridden across the world in search of the Holy 
Grail, returning old and blind to find it at his own 
door. 

"The poor you have ever with you," do not 
pass them by for there is a divinity in common 
things, and to be really acquainted with simple 
forms of life is more than to dwell in marble halls. 
Though far from the madding crowd, having 
found one bird: "a fellow of infinite jest and 
most excellent fancy," let us be content. 



CHAPTER XXI 

THE UNKNOWN PATHWAY 

The poetry of the Book of Job is not only 
something that takes you back to the infancy of 
Time, but with its minute insight, into the troubled 
heart of universal man; it has in it a surge and 
music touching the sublime. The great story 
teller with a great epic to relate, stops to gather 
flowers and comment on facts, minute facts of 
natural history, and later on incorporates the 
flower and the fact into the epic, which would not 
have been so great without them. Listen to this 
brief statement of natural history and open your 
ear to the wonder and the strangeness that is 
opened up by it: "There is a path that no fowl 
knoweth and which the Vulture's eye hath not 
seen." The human Air-man in France did not 
miss many paths, looking from the sky what won- 
derful opportunities for observation; to say that 
he missed one would seem to demand explana- 
tion. Looking down from above, through all the 
ages the birds have been watching and acquainting 
themselves with the paths made by terrestrial crea- 
261 



262 What Birds Have Done With Me 

tures. Nevertheless, there is one that they have 
not known. Science has not apprehended the 
sweep of the Vulture's eye. Instruments for 
measurement have been wanting, baffling mists in- 
tervene between the bird in the sky and the thing 
that he alone sees distinctly. Did you ever care- 
fully scan the sky from the deck of a ship with a 
good glass and be unable to find a glimpse of a 
far off wing, and then cast your bread upon the 
water and have white-winged things dine upon it 
before you were out of sight? The sight of the 
Vulture is presumably first of all, but there is a 
path that he hath not seen. Here is the poetry 
hiding behind the fact, the something unknown, 
the something unseen. 

Nearly a quarter of a century ago at the Maple- 
wood, on Green Lake, the usual peace and quiet 
of the place was changed into the wildest commo- 
tion by the sudden disappearance of the only 
daughter of the home, a child of four years of 
age. It was late April and the lawn was green 
and the Lake sparkling in the sunshine, but it was 
capable of laughing on in merry glee after swal- 
lowing tender innocence; and when she could not 
be found elsewhere, a thousand hideous appre- 
hensions all pointed to the Lake. These were 
dispelled when the shepherd came over the hill 
beckoning wildly, the lost one both figuratively 
and literally was safe in the fold. There we 



The Unknown Pathway 263 

found her perched on the fence, screaming with 
delight over the astounding gambols of the band 
of young lambs. She was quite uncomprehending 
of any alarm on her account. The cow-yard was 
between the house and the sheep-yards ; she could 
not have crossed the first, with its forty head of 
cattle; how had she reached the second? The 
only statement made was one to which she stoutly 
adhered: "The chickens showed me the way." 
This was an incident never likely to be forgotten, 
especially by a father who had been led into 
strange regions by feathered things. 

What a weird and wonderful pathway it has 
been, invisible except as indicated by fluttering 
wings, every future step hedged about and im- 
penetrable, the past shining, sun-kissed, golden. 
Little did the bare-footed boy realize when he 
stepped into that first soft moist furrow that he 
had started on a life journey over that hidden 
pathway that no fowl knoweth and which the Vul- 
ture's eye had not seen. I saw a picture the other 
day of an enormous Spider's Web catching and 
holding little creatures and letting the big ones 
escape. What are big and what are little? Does 
size indicate values? We need a revaluation. A 
little peach is of more value than a big turnip. 
A golden apple than a golden pumpkin. A tiny 
diamond than a great boulder. I am so afraid 
that we cannot get together on the matter of 



264 What Birds Have Done With Me 

values. You want to show me your fat steers 
and pigs and bursting granaries and long corn- 
cribs, and perhaps your bonds and mortgages, for 
which you have exchanged all the days of your 
lives, and when it's too late to be happy, you are 
saying, "Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for 
many days," and before you have finished the com- 
placent boast, mean old death is knocking at the 
door, to tell you that the census taker Time has 
put you on his list. 

What shall a man get for a wasted life, eyes 
self-blinded to flowers and waterfalls, rainbows, 
sunsets, and stars; ears self-stopped to winds and 
waves, and wild bird music? Oh! brother mine, 
I have not been able to tell you before, but for a 
fact, I have stood upon the golden hills of dawn 
close by your side, and while you have prattled 
of your vast wealth my heart has been bursting 
with compassion over your indescribable poverty, 
only counterfeit dollars that will buy nothing. 
These fat fellows slap me on the back and ask 
with well-assumed interest, if I have to engage a 
lawyer to make out my income-tax schedule. It's 
one of the best jokes in the world for we both 
enjoy it equally. They think I have no income and 
I feel certain that if the hat was passed around 
in a congregation of church mice, for their bene- 
fit, the offering should be large. 

Let me see, the unknown pathway first of all 



The Unknown Pathway 265 

led me into a society of aristocrats, some blue 
coated, nearly all blue blooded, and each with 
their own tree. What a big circle it was. If I 
had been the Bishop of their souls, I could not 
have made a pastoral call on each one once in 
ten years. Some, that I knew first in the chart 
class, I later on knew as fathers and mothers, 
grand-fathers and grand-mothers, and as great 
grand-fathers and great grand-mothers, uncles, 
aunts and cousins without end. 

Some birds that I have known, had an indi- 
vidual acquaintance with, would reach into the 
hundreds, possibly, up to the thousands, and all 
have been more or less captivating friends. Human 
friends drop in to dinner when there is nothing 
to eat in the house, come and find you shaving 
and instantly want to try your razor, only to find 
that you don't know how to strop a razor, and 
yours should have been junked years ago. Every- 
thing but your toothbrush you hold in common 
with your friends; and one may not look in the 
direction of five and ten dollar loans for in that 
direction apoplexy lies. Boredom is one of the 
unmitigated curses from which there is no escape 
in the best society, unless that society is composed 
of birds' friends. 

There are people whom we play host to in the 
way that a horse plays host to a gad-fly and some- 
times soul-savers come and want to pray, when 



266 What Birds Have Done With Me 

all out of doors is fairly bathed in the benedic- 
tion of "Mighty God." The Bird Kingdom is 
free from our conventional abuses and there 
climbers excite neither envy nor disgust. Excus- 
ing considerable digression, we come back, to the 
real unhampered joy of bird friends where rela- 
tions are cordial but never too intimate. 

Without being too personal I have been tell- 
ing you about some of these friends in earlier chap- 
ters. I have not really attempted to tell you how 
strong has been my attachment to some of these 
close friends, for has not the great poet of human- 
ity, Shakespeare, warned us that "I would love 
but little if I could tell how much." 

Following along the unknown pathway not only 
led me to the birds themselves, but into that 
great department of our literature that pertains to 
birds, rich, ample, and of absorbing interest. What 
a surprise it was to find the trails blazed from 
an early day, Aristotle and Pliny being volumin- 
ous writers on the subject and a part of it being 
good natural history today, the rest of a charac- 
ter that even Herodotus would have chronicled 
as having been a rumor over in Ethiopia. For 
years, we were not occasional callers at the homes 
of Frank M. Chapman, Mabel Osgood Wright 
and Neltje Blanchan, but steady boarders, and 
according to the customs of rural school teachers, 
in an early day, we boarded around, and Chester 



The Unknown Pathway 267 

A. Reed was a pocket piece. "Nature Study and 
Life" by Clifton Hodge, we fed to boys on Sat- 
urdays around camp fires. This same unknown 
pathway led me to the splendid pioneer work 
on the "Economic Value of Birds" by Prof. F. H. 
King, of the University of Wisconsin, unhappily 
immured in a big volume on Geology and thus kept 
out of general use. 

Again the unknown pathway led to John o' 
Birds and John o' Mountains, Burroughs and 
Muir. With John Burroughs we wandered and 
lost our way, came back and started in again for 
more little journeys in the wilderness of our set- 
tled and cultivated States. Going afield with 
others, you scarcely get beyond the sound of rural 
life, bleat of sheep and low of kine, where Chan- 
ticleer not only salutes the Dawn, but makes vocal 
the passing hour; but "John o' Birds" takes you 
where Dryads glide and Pipes of Pan are heard 
where : 

"Long lights shake across the Lake 

And the wild cataract leaps in glory." 

With "John o' Mountains" we climb dizzy 
heights, and cross impossible crevasses, sharing 
the wild rapture of "Stickeen" and Muir it is that 
shows us a dandelion and dear homey Cock Robin 
cuddled up close together on his very own glacier. 
My daughter and I are agreed that no other 



$6$ What Birds Have Done With Me 

water in this world has such a sparkle or can come 
near to quenching all thirst as that from the Muir 
deep well that his childish hands chiseled from 
the rock at the family home near Pardeeville, 
Wisconsin. And from the same associations, a 
Loon on "Fountain Lake" becomes one of the 
sweet singers in Israel. What a calamity to have 
lived and have passed out of life without know- 
ing and feeling real kinship with two such splendid 
unspoiled men. Only yesterday, I was introduced 
to a gentleman, whose home is in California and 
whose income tax this year will have to be ex- 
pressed by at least six numerals. Wanting to 
take his measure, I asked: "What do you know 
of John Muir?" The name was shrouded by a 
certain mist and at first I had a feeling that he 
was trying to run it down in "Bradstreet" so I 
added, "He was something of a nature-lover." 
Then the light dawned, "Oh! yes, I know about 
him, we have a Prune named after him." Mr. 
Croesus — you poor beggar. 

Long before the war, long before it had en- 
tered into the heart of Woodrow Wilson, to con- 
ceive of his magnificent project of a League of 
Nations, William Dutcher had conceived of a 
magnificent project of a Nature League, uniting 
sportsmen, plume-wearers and all real Nature- 
Lovers in a great Audubon League, for the pro- 
tection of our vanishing wild life. I would insti- 



The Unknown Pathway 269 

tute no comparison between Woodrow Wilson and 
William Dutcher, because in my estimation one 
does not stand a quarter of an inch higher than 
the other, and not knowing which is the older, I 
am not prepared to say which should stand god- 
father for the other. Dutcher's League aims at 
the preservation of vegetation, upon which life 
depends, by saving the birds the natural check on 
insect hordes, which menace all growing things 
and consequently life itself. Wilson, by his 
League, would preserve Justice and Freedom and 
hold in check ignorant hordes that threaten Civ- 
ilization. These sages, seers, stand upon the 
mountain top and whatever the surprises of the 
future, the world will not soon look upon their 
like again. 

The unknown pathway led me into Audubon 
work. Some addresses made for the Agricultural 
Department of the State University led to my 
being selected as Secretary and Treasurer of the 
Wisconsin Audubon Society, which put me on the 
firing line for bird protection. The work opened 
out more and more, and there came into my hori- 
zon, such men as J. Gilbert Pearson, the gifted 
and efficient Secretary of the National Associa- 
tion of Audubon Societies, a veritable Pershing 
in our army of bird protectors, and Dr. Theodore 
S. Palmer, of the Biological Survey, that astute 
strategist and indefatigable worker, the silent 



270 What Birds Have Done With Me 

partner in all legal firms having anything to do 
with bird protection, and William Hornaday, re- 
incarnation of General Grant, the live wire of the 
National Museum of Natural History, whose 
"Vanishing Wild Life" has done more than all 
other writings combined to reveal the brink of the 
pit over which bird life trembles. His book, a 
paper automatic, has done more to silence ma- 
chine guns in the hands of sportsmen than an- 
other man might have done with a bird cannon. 
At a game warden school, held in Madison, Wis- 
consin, I know to my certain knowledge, that two 
thirds of the Game Wardens joined the Audubon 
Society and arranged to purchase "Our Vanishing 
Wild Life" as fixed ammunition to be carried in 
their kits. The very best letter ever written me 
was received, soon after that school, from one of 
the wardens, full of enthusiasm and anxious to do 
"something for the little birds." The letter was 
addressed to "The Birds' Attorney" and signed 
"John Eagan, your Office Boy." 

The unknown pathway led to a lecture field that 
covered much of Wisconsin and part of Missis- 
sippi, and articles on birds for the public press and 
letters without end. Among bird workers in Wis- 
consin, Prof. A. H. Burrill and E. A. Cleasby de- 
serve special mention. Wisconsin bird-lovers can 
never pay the debt they owe these splendid work- 
ers, who are both out of the State and whose 



The Unknown Pathway 271 

places it will be difficult to fill. The Biological 
Survey in Washington got Cleasby, and Burrill 
finally went West, but not till he had done yeo- 
man's service in helping the writer in securing Bird 
Sanctuaries aggregating more than sixty-five thou- 
sand acres, throughout the State. Generous, big- 
hearted Dr. A. M. Benson must come in for due 
credit in having donated a full page in the Wis- 
consin Humane Herald for Audubon work after 
"By the Wayside," the organ of the Society, had 
died a natural death. W. W. Cook, formerly of 
Ripon, Wisconsin, and later on of Washington, 
D. C, aided by Prof. Mitchell, of the Milwau- 
kee Normal School, did valuable Bird Work, in 
which our State had a special interest. 

Among the fine Nature Books written by Gene 
Stratton-Porter, her "Birds of the Bible" stands 
out in my recollection as having been especially 
interesting, for it furnishes evidence that an in- 
structive volume can be written, not only on birds 
mentioned in the Bible, but on those mentioned 
in Shakespeare and the beauty of much poetry 
would be utterly destroyed, were we to attempt 
to eliminate all references to birds. Poetry with- 
out its birds, would be as silent and desolate as the 
coming of spring in the Northland without its re- 
turning migrants — its very life, melody and glad- 
ness. 

Through more than a half century of reading, 



272 What Birds Have Done With Me 

the flutter of a bird's wing has opened a window 
for me to the wide, wide sky. Friends from every- 
where have been clipping and sending me notices 
of birds appearing in the daily press, and if old 
Santa Claus found himself at my door with no 
bird book in his pack for me, I have a notion 
that he would feel that he had overlooked some- 
thing. Mine is a bird world and I could not live 
in any other. They are surely my birds for am I 
not the "Bird Man" and "The Birds' Attorney"? 
A Telephone Company once offered me a hundred 
dollars if I would allow them to clean up a hun- 
dred rods of trees and shrubs and vines and wild 
roses growing along a public road near their poles. 
It greeted me "sair" to have to assure its field 
man that I no longer had title through adverse 
possession, the birds in more than twenty years 
had gained that, and as their legal representative, 
the best I could do would be to act, if he secured 
their consent in writing. Not two minutes ago a 
hardened coquette, aged three, perched on a gate- 
post, called me, a mere passing acquaintance, to 
her and whispered, "I seem to care more for you 
than for any body else." Following the example 
of my youthful admirer, I want, in the strictest 
confidence, to whisper into the big ear of the pub- 
lic: "I seem to care more for some birds than 
for some people and I don't care if I do." 

Again I feel the lure of the pathway that no 



The Unknown Pathway 273 

fowl knoweth and which the Vulture's eye hath 
not seen. Is it not the wondrous pathway across 
the sky, the unmapped, uncharted highway used 
by the unnumbered billions of migrants that with 
the changing seasons, spring and fall, have gone 
back and forth, leaving no trace behind? I am 
writing these last words here in Dixie Land and 
from my window I can see the Purple Martins 
just demobilized from the advanced guard of mi- 
grants and the mighty urge is being born again. 
What matter if I go ahead or follow? I am going 
back home with the birds, my singer, my song, but 
yours as much as mine, if you will open your heart 
to the singer and the song. 

What means Alfred Tennyson by saying: 

"Ah ! sad and strange as in dark summer dawns 
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds 
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes 

The casement slowly grows a glimmering 
square." 

A recognition of "The earliest pipe of the half 
awakened birds" will banish the strangeness and 
do much to eliminate the sadness and "While the 
casement slowly grows a glimmering square" to 
dying eyes, dying ears may hear in these pipings, 
the first faint notes of the choir invisible. 

In very fact, the bird-lover, on the wings of 



274 What Birds Have Done With Me 

the birds he loves, is carried upward, where Alps 
on Alps arise to far altitudes, that he never could 
have reached alone. 



